


The Right to Be Wrong

by knitwrit



Series: The Ley Lines Universe [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Abusive Relationships, Adult Hermione Granger, Aftermath of Torture, Aftermath of Violence, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Bechdel Test Pass, Black Character(s), Black Hermione Granger, Divorce, Emotional Manipulation, Everyone Needs A Hug, Ex-Auror Harry Potter, F/F, F/M, Genderqueer Character, Global Warming, Hate Crimes, Hermione Granger & Harry Potter Friendship, Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Jewish Character, LGBTQ Themes, Lawyer Hermione Granger, M/M, Magic and Science, Mother-Daughter Relationship, POV Hermione Granger, POV Multiple, POV Severus Snape, Post-Second War with Voldemort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Remus Lupin Lives, Ron Weasley Being an Asshole, Severus Snape Lives, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-19
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-02-27 03:48:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 31
Words: 85,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22310575
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/knitwrit/pseuds/knitwrit
Summary: A fic that takes place in an A.U. wherein Snape had made an antidote to Nagini's venom after Arthur was bitten at the ministry.  An antidote which Hermione had always kept a single dose of in her pocket.  An antidote which she injected into his blood after he gave her his memories, saving his life.Fifteen years after the war, they meet to discuss Snape's one abiding passion through it all; his mastery of difficult, dangerous, and life-saving potions.Hermione finds, to her surprise, a man who has grown to be a wildly different one from the teacher she knew before and during the war.  Seeing Snape embrace a life that was so radically different from what he had known begins to make her question; how much has she, or any of her friends, truly recovered from the impact of that war?
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley, Hermione Granger/Severus Snape, Katie Bell/Ginny Weasley, Luna Lovegood/Harry Potter, Sirius Black/Remus Lupin
Series: The Ley Lines Universe [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1631938
Comments: 60
Kudos: 122
Collections: Focus on Female Characters, Political HP Fics, Women being awesome





	1. Equality

**Author's Note:**

> I must credit Flamethrower for his interpretation of Snape's internal motivations for acting like a completely prejudiced jerk during his time at Hogwarts. Without Flamethrower, this work would not exist. Honestly, Flamethrower's take on Snape makes more sense than cannon.
> 
> Secondly, I tend to be a write and post first, edit later kinda gal. It keeps me motivated when I know I'm posting regularly rather than feeling like I've gotta get it perfect before it's up. 
> 
> If you would prefer to read the polished version, check it out a couple of days or maybe a week or so after I've posted it, so that I've had the time to edit!
> 
> Finally, warning: I did not come to Mary Sue! (Or Larry Stu). Be prepared for complex characters who have flaws, make mistakes, and hopefully learn and grow from it all. Your favourite character will do at least one really stupid thing, maybe even more than once on their way to personal redemption. Nobody said personal growth was gonna be easy, or look less than messy and raw.

Hermione Granger stood before the unremarkable white panneled door and found herself, for the first time in years, taken aback. She stared at the door and the strange double vision in front of her. To most eyes, all they would see would be the same generic green plastic plaque that adorned all the doors in the hallway: unique only by its identifier 1-109, embossed in simple white lettering. In the space for sliding in the professors names, the paper print off proclaimed: Dr. Helena Pomfrey. And scribbled in plain blue pen ballpoint pen underneath: Severus Snape, T.A. However, a fainter image shifted underneath in magic. Rather than static, the magicked image shifted between the two different names, proclaiming two different titles: Dr. Severus Snape, and Master Helena Pomfrey, T.A.. But this charm shifted the names back in forth in a play between their two positions: as soon as the eye had time to take in the impression of who was the doctor and who was the assistant, it shifted the words back to the reverse order: Dr. Helena Pomfrey, assisted by Severus Snape, T.A.. 

It was not the charm itself that surprised her: of course Snape would be capable of putting up such a simple charm over the door, aware only to magical eyes. It was the way that he had done it that gave her pause. The shifting titles, the names reversing their order on the door. She had not known that he would have thought to give such a clear indication of his equality to his Squib colleague. And yes, she knew that Dr. Pomfrey had achieved her credentials legitimately in the Muggle world, that despite her time working with Snape on his integration of Muggle technology with wizarding potions, she still managed to publish many works in her chosen field of medical technology in the Muggle world. 

It was unheard of for a Squib to gain a masters in potions; but with the breakthroughs that had come to the wizarding world because of Dr. Pomfrey’s unique research they could not deny her the masters when she had demanded it, suing the Potions association for discrimination in front of the Wizengamot itself. 

Still, it took Hermione by surprise to see the esteem that Snape obviously had afforded his colleague, despite that most magicians would never come to this small hallway on the first floor of the medical sciences building, in a small campus in Northern B.C.

She shook her head to clear it and knocked on the door. 

A tall woman with curly brown hair tied up lazily onto her head answered the door. She was dressed in trousers, a plain blue knit sweater covering her slender frame. She had sharp, intelligent eyes and a kind smile on her face. Three figures, all dressed in Muggle clothing were crowded around the same computer in the small office behind her, talking excitedly in low voices. 

“Madam—Doctor Pomfrey?” Hermione quickly corrected herself, cursing herself for the stumble. If Snape could afford his colleague the prestige of her rank in the Muggle world, so could she.

“Ah!” Dr. Pomfrey responded warmly, reaching out her hand to shake Hermione’s in a firm, warm grip. “You must be Hermione Granger. Please, come in.”

The office was impossibly cramped, with two desks in the same small space; one the large wooden desk, facing the door, covered in stacks of neatly arranged books and papers, an in-out box, a laptop, and the engraved desk plaque proclaiming Dr. Helena Pomfrey, Ph.D., M.D.

The second desk was behind it, facing the wall. It was there the three people had been all crowded around a single desktop with two screens. As they were all spreading out from the computer to greet her, she realized with a start that she knew the man who stood in the middle of the crowd, though he now had grey hair at his temples: Severus Snape. 

But, far from the gaunt, tired looking man who had taught her potions for years in school, this was a man who seemed to radiate energy and wellbeing.

“Madam Granger!” Snape smiled, stepping forward to shake her hand. Hermione had to click her mouth shut not to gape at how foreign the smile seemed on his face as she wordlessly shook his hand. “Or, as I understand I will soon be allowed to say, Dr. Granger?”

Hermione smiled in spite of herself. 

“I haven’t been sworn in quite yet,” she stated. “Given that I seem to have gained an appreciation for the fine nuances of protocol throughout my years advocating, let’s wait with the titles until I am. But how did you know?”

Although it was no secret that Hermione had been eyed by the International Wizarding Legal Society for awarding her a legum doctorate for some years now, she had not expected Snape to keep track of such a detail as her upcoming swearing in, at least not until after the fact when it would be announced in the papers. 

“One does one’s proper research when one is invited by a war hero to begin a fascinating research project,” Snape replied. He looked at the two women who were standing next to him. They were both young women in their early twenties wearing simple Muggle clothing, jeans and t-shirts. Snape himself was swearing the all black she was familiar with; but a button down shirt, simple, and black dress pants without a robe. 

“Forgive me, we were not expecting you so early. I don’t even have an extra chair to offer you, as these students had come to follow up with me about some of the other research we are just finishing up with. But allow me to introduce you: this is Mx. Pierre. Their pronouns are they, their, and them.” He gestured to the young person to his right. Now that Hermione had heard their pronouns so clearly, she realized that they were dressed in androgynous clothing, although their long dark hair was kept in a pony tail. He gestured to his left, where a young woman of dark hair and bronze skin was standing. “And this is Ms. Berland. She uses the pronouns she, her and hers. I myself still prefer he and him, and Dr. Pomfrey uses she and her.”

It was an elegant way to give her the information she needed without singling out Mx. Pierre. Hermione shook both their hands and realized that she would have to continue to update her expectations of the demeanour of her former professor. 

Snape was waving his wand to conjure a seat; a simple fold up chair popped into existence on the wall beside Hermione. 

“The best I could manage in this small space,” Snape said. 

“It’s all right, Dr. Snape,” the young woman—Ms. Berland?-- said. “You’ve helped us immensely. We’ll continue to crunch the data and see what else we can find.”

“Of course,” Snape murmured. “Please drop by any time. I know using Muggle technology like computers can be difficult at first, but I think you see now why I insist all my apprentices learn.”

Ms. Berland and Mx. Pierre gathered their bags and their coats, a process which took some time given the terrible cold outside. Snape rummaged through some papers on his desk. 

“And Mx. Pierre?” They looked to him with what Hermione actually thought might be adulation on their face. “Your ideas on the lifespan of magical pathogens being interdependent on the patterns of magic users are fascinating. Do not let anyone tell you otherwise. I believe you should publish these results when you are ready.”

That earned Snape a full smile, and to Hermione’s great surprise, tears which glistened for a moment in Mx. Pierre’s eyes as he handed her back a stack of parchment heavily laden with what looked like hand written comments.

“Thank you, sir,” they muttered, and Snape clasped them on the shoulder briefly as they blinked for several moments as they left. 

Hermione found herself, for the second time in ten minutes, gawping at her former teacher. 

“Yes, Madam Granger,” Snape agreed drily, taking her expression in as the door shut behind the two apprentices. “It turns out when I am not actively spying on a thrice bedamned manman and on his ignorant, torture hungry cronies, who expected I hold the same views as they and would not hesitate to murder me if I gave a second of an appearance of not doing so, I too, can manage basic courtesies.”

“Oh,” Hermione said. Years of her her experiences under his education suddenly shifted into a new, unexpected perspective. “Oh- of course.” She was, she realized, much to her embarrassment, stammering. 

“But you didn’t come all this way to speak of my-- my most unfortunate past,” Snape looked around the office, his expression suddenly unreadable.

“Tea, perhaps, is in order,” Dr. Pomfrey suggested gently. Snape’s gaze snapped up to meet the doctor’s. Hermione wondered if she was imagining it, or if tension had suddenly radiated in stark lines along Snape’s face. 

He smiled, but it seemed to lack the depth with which he had congratulated Mx.Pierre. 

“Yes,” Snape agreed, “Tea.” 

She had not imagined the tension; he was leaning against Dr. Pomfrey’s chair, his hands clenching it tightly. 

Dr. Pomfrey was studying his face with concern. 

“Why don’t I show Hermione to our lounge, such as it is. I’m sure she would appreciate it. Come join us in a moment, Severus.” She touched his shoulder briefly, and they met eyes. Hermione had the sense an unspoken message passed between them, and Snape nodded jerkily, once. 

Hermione found herself being gently but firmly escorted out of the office, leaving Snape behind them to collect himself. 

She found tears were stinging in her eyes despite herself. 

God, but the war had taken so much, from so many of them. 

But Dr. Pomfrey was talking as they walked down the hallways, not letting her fall into that particularly dark undertow. 

“As you can see, we share space with the university and the non magical, or as we commonly say in the wizarding world, the Muggles. We are highly dependent on them- and yes, Severus has earned his position as a teacher’s assistant at this university every bit as much as I have earned my doctorate. He really does act as my T.A. while he is completing his master’s in bio chemistry. We have both found it invaluable to be able to use the facilities of this school; the microscopes, the imaging techniques, and my god, the programming on these computers have saved us countless hours, not to mention, expense. As you can see Ms. Granger, we are far from well funded. We need these facilities to conduct our experiments in.”

She was gesturing to a lab, closed and locked, but simply labelled “Bio Chem lab” on the doorway, and on the wall beside the door hazard symbols in clear pictograms stood out.

They came to a space in the bricks, and Dr. Pomfrey paused in front of it, knocking on the bricks in a rhythmic pattern. Prime numbers, Hermione realized. 

“Did you see which bricks?” Dr. Pomfrey asked. Hermione frowned. 

“You might have to show me again,” she admitted. 

“Of course,” Dr. Pomfrey agreed. “Yourself will only have to use a wand and tap once. As a Squib I was never granted one, so I have to use a more complicated pattern to assure the wards that I am, in fact, being intentional about this and not just a non magical person happening to hit against the wall.”

Hermione noted again that she had said non-magical person and not Muggle.

“But let me show you the bricks after you’ve had some time to get settled. It must have been an awful trip, to come so far by portkey.”

Hermione nodded. It had been.

A door materialised in front of them, and they stepped inside. 

It was a small room, with a hearth, a table that could sit four at most and four chairs that barely fit around it. Behind it, were two sofas facing the cast iron stove and the long windows that overlooked the snowy campus. A small room off to the side smelled faintly of potion ingredients. There were wall to wall cupboards, and Dr. Pomfrey was rustling through them to find a kettle to put on the wood stove.

She banked the coals and took wood from a stack that materialised out of the farthest corner in the room when she wrapped her knuckles against that wall. 

Hermione was sinking gratefully into the couch, and watched as the lean doctor expertly tossed wood into the stove, surprised by how quickly the banked coals met the wood to create a cheerful fire. 

“Unfortunate to do it this way, really, it takes so much longer,” Dr. Pomfrey was saying as she adjusted the vents on the front of the stove. “But you know how magic and electronics tend to produce most unexpected results.”

“Yes,” Hermione said absently, “But Ron—my husband—and I try to get around that by using heavily warded appliances.”

“Expensive,” Dr. Pomfrey commented. “And anyway, we can’t risk it. We’re already doing highly experimental potions. And we are, after all, already surrounded by electronics. We used all our budget on the warded bricks and the doorways in here.”

Dr. Pomfrey stood up from adjusting the stove, and brushed her hands. 

“Can I get you something else to drink while we wait for the tea? Juice, sparkling water, water?”

“A beer would be nice if you have one,” Hermione admitted.

“Ahh, we’re a dry facility, I’m afraid, and quite strict about it. Potions and alcohol are another thing that just don’t mix.”

“Makes sense,” Hermione agreed absentmindedly, letting her eyes glance around the surroundings, taking in the cheery tone, the obviously rescued and second hand furnishings. “Really, I’m grateful for whatever you have to offer.”

Dr. Pomfrey brought her sparkling water and a tray of scones from a cold box. 

The door behind them opened and Snape walked through, holding a briefcase and looking more composed than before. 

“Oh, good thinking Severus,” Dr. Pomfrey sighed, settling into the couch across from Hermione. “You always are the organized one.”

Snape smiled, and sat beside Dr. Pomfrey, setting the briefcase on the low coffee table in front of them. 

“Don’t underestimate yourself,” he chided her gently. “You could hardly have gotten a Ph.D. and an M.D. without having some organizational abilities, after all.”

Something about those words were tickling a memory for her, but she couldn’t place it. She shrugged it off, as Snape passed Hermione a stack of paperwork; this one, unexpectedly, printed from computer paper, but charmed that only she could read it. 

“I charmed it so that you could add any authorizations you saw fit to the wards, Madam Granger,” Severus was saying. “But I thought I should leave it to your discretion over who sees this.”

Hermione began paging through the paperwork in fascination. 

‘A Proposal on the Modification of Wolf’s Bane potion. Is remission from Lycanthropy possible?’ 

“I wasn’t expecting so much, so soon,” Hermione admitted weakly. “You’ve really outdone yourselves.”

Snape was blasé, but Dr Pomfrey was beaming at the words. 

Of course, if Hermione really was honest with herself, she realized that Snape had always been exact, precise, and accurate in his information. She had been dreading the trip to see him, but as much as Ron had protested when he learned who she and Harry were considering for this grant, there was a reason they had chosen Severus Snape as their first contender for the grant. 

Not that they had told him as much, but his reputation did speak for himself; while he had been a pre-eminent Potions master before and during the war, it was several years after the war that he had begun to reach his true potential. His publications rose from national to international importance; and his daring work with Dr. Pomfrey had forged new paths in magical medicine, as slowly the use of intravenous injections and drips became standard care for the wounded. It would have been unthinkable before the war; but after the war, attitudes had begun to change. And while Hermione and her political allies had shoved, dragged, and lawyered the politics of the British wizarding world into the 20th century, America and South Africa (the other political powerhouses in the international wizarding world) had breathed a sigh of relief that finally their powerful but backwards peer had managed to struggle its way to rights based reforms. 

Without those attitudinal and political changes, the wizarding world simply could never have supported the research of Dr. Pomfrey and Dr. Snape, and whatever inventions they had found would have likely festered, unused, in the journals.

“As you can see,” Dr. Pomfrey was beaming pleasantly at Hermione’s interest, “We are not only intrigued by your request for proposals, but committed to taking it as seriously as it deserves. Studying lycanthropy has hardly ever been a serious endeavour. The last time any kind of research in that area was done was in the eighties. There have been so many advances since then. This topic deserves more research. But as you know, the last advances were made when a Potion maker’s son was infected. Nothing has been done because there has been no funding whatsoever for the endeavour. If we gain your grant, you can rest assured that you will have Severus’s undivided attention for the two years of research you’re proposing on this.”

Hermione looked up, surprised. 

“And yours, Dr. Pomfrey?” she asked. It had been submitted as a joint research proposal.

“Alas, you will have my divided attention,” Dr. Pomfrey answered. She shrugged. “The dangers of being a Squib, Madam Granger, are that I cannot afford to leave my duties in the non Magical world for two years, as Severus can.”

“Of course I wouldn’t want you to lose your place in the non magical world, Dr. Pomfrey, but what will your duties here entail?”

Dr. Pomfrey raised a hand, palm up, and gestured to their surroundings. 

“I will continue to be employed by the University of Northern British Columbia as a lecturer and researcher. I have worked hard for a position of tenure and I simply cannot afford to take the time away from my duties that would be necessary to fully assist Severus.”

“Then why the joint proposal?” 

“It is necessary,” Snape said firmly, shooting a stern glance at Dr. Pomfrey, as if expecting her to object. “I have been working with Dr. Pomfrey in one capacity or another for the past ten years, and closely so for the past five years. She is a remarkable intellect, and is one of the only, if not, the only person in the entire wizarding world who is both qualified and capable of combining magical sight with Muggle methods of scientific inquiry. Further, I have become dependent on the facilities here. Now that I’m finally able to find a partnership that enables me to use all the technology of the non magical world, I have found it to be superior to the methods of the wizarding world for imaging to a certain extent and, most especially, the prediction and analytical capacity of modern computers.

“Although to be perfectly frank, Madam Granger, I will need to continue in my position at least on paper as Dr. Pomfrey’s administrative assistant. I will need to continue to have access to the research facilities here.”

“Here?” Hermione squeaked. This was the one piece in the plan she hadn’t anticipated. 

“Yes,” Snape nodded. Although he was as unreadable as ever, Dr. Pomfrey was frowning with tension. “After all, Dr. Pomfrey has tenure here, at the U.N.B.C. And I am in the employ of the parallel magical school of Nisga’a international. Although that last one I could do my work anywhere in the world, my apprentices are students of Nisga’a. And they while they may be willing to move, that does not change the fact that all four of us need to have access to high-class research facilities. And that, Madam Granger, is a problem that even all the money in the world could not easily solve.”

“It’s the one disadvantage of hiring us,” Dr. Pomfrey admitted simply. “We’re not local to England and have no intention of changing that. But we would of course, update the foundation regularly of all our progress, by means either magical or technological, as to your wishes. And of course, we could make ourselves available if you wish for tours or audits by other Potion masters or doctors.”

Hermione sighed. The truth was, there was no one in England who had the qualifications of Snape or Dr Pomfrey, and few in the world who had produced the kinds of results they had within the past decade.

“We’re not likely to get anyone local anyway, not even likely in all of Europe,” she admitted. 

“No,” Snape agreed. “There are few true researchers in this field because the money just isn’t there. I’m very interested in this budding foundation of Harry’s. I hope he understands what kind of impact it will have. With these kinds of competitive grants, he’s going to be funding the first magical advancements internationally our small, backwards world has seen in ages.” 

Hermione smiled, nodding in agreement. 

That’s exactly what she had told him, when she realized that Harry was floundering and uncertain about where to put his energy and efforts after he finally threw in the towel of being an over-stressed and under-paid Auror.

“Exactly,” she agreed happily. It was a point that Harry didn’t seem to fully appreciate yet; but she knew that he would start to see it over time. It was the rights-based angle and the personal connection he had to this issue through Remus Lupin had intrigued Harry. He wanted to find a way to push further for werewolf rights. But when he began to see the advancements his foundation would make? She was certain he would come to realize the wider implications.

Ron just shrugged and thought she was trying to find another way to be a perpetual student. But he had shrugged with his usual bemused smile, and so Hermione had taken on the investigation of this, one of their first forays into scientific grants with the enthusiasm that she took on any new project.

She flipped through the pages to the research ethics section. This was one of the other reasons Harry had asked her to personally investigate their potential researchers. Intrigued as he had been on the report of his other staff of the quality of Snape and Dr. Pomfrey’s initial proposal, he had known Snape in his previous life as a surly and embittered Potions teacher. He had asked Hermione to check in on it personally especially to ensure for the ethics of the project from a legal perspective, but also to ascertain the character of their potential grantees.

She kept stifling yawns as she paged through it; to her first glance, the section on ethics looked to be of the highest quality possible standards she could have imagined, although of course, she’d have to have the research board look over that part in more detail.

“Madam Granger,” Snape said gently as she studied the papers. “It has been a long day of travel. We really did not expect you to thoroughly look over all these details of our preliminary research tonight. And Dr Pomfrey still hasn’t had the chance to show you your quarters. If we call it a night from here, would you be amenable to taking up our conversations again tomorrow, after Dr. Pomfrey is done her lecture hours, and I’ve done my office hours for students?”

It was, after all, the schedule they had previously agreed to. 

She could have foreseeably come all in one day for the trip, but well, Harry had wanted her to be thorough and she thought she should be rested enough to properly vet the place. And also, she had really, really, not wanted to miss the vote in the Wizengamot as they continued to follow up on the court’s recommendations about prison reform and prisoner’s rights. She wanted to be present when the Purebloods would see the votes, realize that their totalitarian regime was crumbling yet further under the joint weight of judicial, political, and social reform. 

So many nights spent working on seemingly dry political wording, pouring through reference materials, building cases from precedents hundreds of years old; it was moments like these, when the courts and the political system (finally, finally, separate from each other after centuries of political oppression) ground the gears of their machinations, and spit out something new, something called democracy, something called rights; this was why she gave up her nights to study law while she was raising her children, so that she could make these kinds of lasting changes. 

And after that? Yes, a moment of preparation for her upcoming legum doctorate, a promise from her husband that he would celebrate with her properly once he got back from breaking a curse on a strange British wizard’s house in Jamaica, and then she Portkeyed to Canada, too curious to stay away from the next victory she could smell coming for the rights of those who had been oppressed for too long. 

But, put it all together? It made for an exhausting day.

“Yes, please,” she agreed amicably, her jaw cracking in another embarassingly long yawn. “It’s high time.”


	2. Recovery

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hermione has an awkward, and unexpected, conversation with her former professor.

She awoke the next morning in a strange bed in a strange house. The small flat that hosted international visitors was integrated with both modern Muggle technology and what she imagined was traditional Nisga’a magical housing, featuring a central hearth and small lamps that burned on what smelled like whale oil. She wandered into the small study with a pot of hot tea and sat down in front of her laptop, curious to study some of the analysis about statistical significance and regressions that Snape and Dr. Pomfrey had performed. She wanted to look closer at the raw data and make sure that the numbers matched what their findings said, but for that she needed to login to the secure portal that they had made for the project. It was work well beyond what she would have expected for a mere grant proposal, and true to their word, it showed how seriously they were taking the project. 

The other candidates had only submitted a couple of paragraphs outlining the state of previous research, as well as some thoughts on what avenues would be worthy of future investigation. 

This quality was greatly beyond that.

She opened her laptop and sighed. It was totally dead, of course. Her first three laptops had exploded miserably when she attempted any kind of teleportation; whether by Portkey, Apparition, or Floo. Finally, she had managed to find a seller who had been able to guarantee her that the wards on his electronics would not blow up at the first provocation of teleportation, but she never could get through any kind of magical transportation and have the battery last. 

She plugged in the laptop and went to the kitchen to make a light breakfast from what supplies were provided in the flat while it charged. 

When she came back, the laptop was still black. 

She frowned, and flicked on the light in the room to inspect it closer, not wanting to dare to try with her wand next to her still dormant laptop. 

But the light did not go on. 

Surely, the small bit of magic she had done the night before hadn’t fried the electronics at the house already? She would feel somewhat responsible for offering some sort of compensation if she had, although, really, they should be better warded than that for their audience of international wizards, who most would expect to be able to do at least some magic despite the presence of electronics. 

She shook her head and took out the spelled paper Snape had given her the previous night to aide in instantaneous international magical communication and wrote a brief message to him alone: 

_I think I might have accidentally blown out the electricity in the flat you gave me._

She sipped on her tea and waited for a response, massaging her neck and wondering suddenly if her tone had been a trifle informal for a potential investor that they had both more or less told her they desperately needed. 

Some few minutes later, a response: 

_Not your fault at all. The storm blew out the grid on your side of campus last night. It’s okay here, though. Is there anything you need?_

She looked out the window and realized that indeed, the storm was still rattling against the windows, although it was no longer snowing fiercely. 

It made her realize how long she had been separate from the Muggle world, that she hadn’t even thought to wonder about how the storm last night would affect their plans for the day. 

_If it’s possible, I’d greatly appreciate coming to the office. I’d like to look more closely at the data you gave me before we talk more thoroughly about it._

The response this time was immediate. 

_Of course. So long as you don’t mind that I may have to attend to non-magical students for at least an hour, so please do be conscientious that we cannot discuss any of the results of this preliminary research whilst they are present. My office hours for my T.A. position start at 9A.M. and go until 10 A.M., and I do frequently get non-magical students visiting during those times._

_I will be there shortly,_ Hermione responded. And then added, _Thank you._

She walked over the distance from the residential area to the buildings, wrapped tight but still shivering in the cold. Even her warming charms were taking a beating under the harsh wind. She suddenly realized that she was surrounded by students in parkas and fur, not an inch of exposed skin to the elements. She frowned at how easily she had forgotten to take precautions to fit in, and that she had best pretend at least that her lack of frost-bite was due to mundane means rather than magic (or, as the Muggles would assume, a minor miracle). She pulled her hood tighter and surreptitiously evoked herself a long hat with ear flaps that she had seen many of the other students wearing under their hoods, and thick mittens over the hands she had shoved into her coat sleeves. 

It was about a twenty minute walk trudging through the snow, but she considered it a necessary stretch for her limbs after the cramping of multiple portkeys that took her first across the Atlantic, and then over the continent. 

She found the office easily. The door was open despite the early hour, and Snape was already sitting at the larger front desk, a large mug of tea in his hands. 

He stood up to greet her, and waved her into the office, and they exchanged greetings as he showed her where to hang her coat and invited her to sit in his desk with her laptop so that he could attend to any students at Dr. Pomfrey’s large desk. 

They settled into a surprisingly comfortable silence after he passed her a mug of tea in an insulated mug, and Hermione raised her eyebrows after the first sip. It seemed Snape had noticed exactly how she liked her tea from the night before, and had prepared for her the exact mix of creaminess and sweetness that she preferred. Not even Ron remembered that she preferred honey rather than sugar in her tea. But then, she re-evaluated, well, what did she expect? After all, Snape had done one better than his previous title of potions master, and now was properly, a Doctor of Potions. So perhaps it wasn’t just kissing arse, but just the sort of thing that a man like him couldn’t help but remember, and emulate to perfection.

As he had warned her, he did have several students dropping by within the first fifteen minutes. They all accepted his vaguely worded explanation that she was a visiting research associate of Dr. Pomfrey’s, and ignored her presence at the small desk behind them as they asked Snape a number of technical questions about an upcoming exam they were apparently preparing for. 

Hermione was shocked to realize that they all looked so young to her eyes. At 17, she had been fighting in a war. Surely, these ones must be at least that age, if not older, but still she had a hard time seeing them as old enough to be doing the kind of work that they were, most of them serious about futures in some kind of medical field. 

She realized as she scrolled through the data and absently eavesdropped on Snape, that he was a courteous, thorough, and challenging teacher. He did not give answers away easily, but encouraged his students to always develop their own reasoning skills. If they became truly stuck, he would never give them an easy answer, but gently guide them back to their foundational lessons, asking them questions until they stumbled into an answer themselves. 

The students seemed relaxed with him, in great contrast to his years at Hogwarts, and he with them. 

Well. 

As Snape himself had pointed out, he was no longer working as a spy of a madman and his indentured murderers. 

“Hermione?” Snape interrupted her musings. 

“Hmmm?” she looked up from the screen with what she knew Ron called her ‘distracted scholar look’. She did not really have the expertise to be truly understanding the kinds of statistical results Snape had been getting, but a few run through of the numbers with a program had helped her to realize that he had not whatsoever fudged his data. Beyond that, she was aware enough of her limitations to know that she couldn’t puzzle much understanding out of the numbers, but well; she could recommend Harry hire others to do that before they signed on with Snape and Dr. Pomfrey. The Boy who Lived (Twice, as Harry always sardonically said) had more than enough money to pour into this project for that. 

“Would you mind if I leave you here to go to the computer lab for a moment? Mr. Gervais here has some rather particular questions that are best answered by looking at the data with some programs that I don’t have on this computer.”

“Oh, of course, don’t worry about me,” Hermione replied. 

Snape and his student- Mr. Gervais- left her alone in the office, closing the door and posting a sign stating when Snape would be back so that Hermione would not have to worry about shooing away any further visitors. 

She tried blinking at the screen for longer, but after several more attempts to scroll through the data they had given her, she realized was not going to get much more information out of it than she already had.

She closed her laptop and looked at the bulletin board on the small desk in front of her, half hidden under the cupboard. 

An article, clearly printed from an internal departmental newsletter, was posted to the board. It was a picture of Snape smiling, with his arms around two of his students. Not a magical picture, but frozen in time. The words below it: Teacher Assistant of the year, Severus Snape, honoured at science faculty luncheon. The article itself had been clipped off. Hermione shook her head in disbelief. 

“Harry,” she muttered, “You are never going to believe this one.”

She found herself taking it off the bulletin board to look at it closer, although if she had paused to think about it, she might have thought it a bit rude.

Writing in a blue ball point pen was scrawled across the bottom:

_To Sev,_

_Just like you’re always telling me, never underestimate yourself. Helena._

She pinned it back to the board and committed herself to further snooping. 

Well, she was here to audit, but if she was really honest with herself, that included informally as well. After all, Harry couldn’t start up a new foundation, give its flagship project to a jerk, and then watch the whole venture sink just because Snape couldn’t hold his manners. 

And with Dr. Pomfrey self-admitting to taking a more minor role than they had thought from the initial paperwork, she really would need to be certain that Snape could conduct himself with continuing good graces; that he wasn’t just kissing up to her because for once, she held the money and the power in her hands. 

She stretched and looked around his office, looking for more answers to the question of who was the man Severus Snape had become. 

She wandered over to the small bookshelf that was open underneath the windows. Textbooks of course: chemistry, biology, statistics, nothing really that stood out to her. But on the top shelf, most easily reached by his chair, she found a surprise. 

The Talmud for beginners. 

The complete idiot’s guide to Understanding Judaism.

Judaism for Dummies.

The Torah as a guide for Enlightenment. That last one looked particularly well thumbed. 

Well. 

She hadn’t known he was Jewish.

Or that he would ever buy a book that widely marketed itself as a guide to idiots or dummies. 

Next to this obvious theme, was a volume that was creased and even more well-used than the one about Torah and Enlightenment. 

Just for Today.

She paged through it, and actually gasped out loud. 

It seemed to be a self-help book for drug addicts. One which was underlined, starred, dog eared in multiple places, and even with comments in the margins in that familiar hand writing that had marked so many of Hermione’s essays. 

Well, that was one rumour proved true in yet another way. Harry had thrown himself into investigating that particular rabbit hole with the usual mad fervour that he followed leads. He had sworn to her he had verified six different ways that the rumours were definitely true; she now had another piece of evidence to add to his pile. 

Of course, it would be that moment when Snape walked back into his office, as Hermione sat with the book open in her hands. 

She refused to jump.

All right, so maybe she had jumped a little. 

Snape took the scene in with impassive eyes. 

And to her surprise, he sat down across from her at Dr. Pomfrey’s desk, as if he were a student coming to her for aide and simply nodded. 

“I see my least well kept-secret is out,” he said, gesturing at the book. 

Hermione flushed. 

“If you say it is,” Hermione answered weakly, “Then it must be so.”

“It is,” Snape said simply. 

They stared at each other for a couple of moments, and Snape appeared to be fingering something in his pocket. He took out a small metal coin and passed it to her. 

She looked at it wordlessly: it was a small nickel coin with a triangle on the front, reminding her rather bizarrely of the Deathly Hallows. But this had a very different message: To Thine Own Self Be True, embossed around the coin. And in the centre: 24 hours. 

She flipped it over and saw a prayer was written on the back, but where the word God was written, Snape had scratched out the middle “o” so that it read “G-d grant me the serenity to accept what I cannot change…”

“I suppose this is as good a time as any to get this out of the way.” Snape had a matter-of –fact tone, one that either was hiding his stress rather masterfully, or he really was quite at ease with the conversation they were now having. 

“ I know you and Harry too well to think that Harry wouldn’t have followed up on those rumours about me like a dog with a bone. As easy as it would have been to simply ask me-“ and here his tone did become a trifle dry – “I know Harry always did like to take the hard way through certain tasks.”

Hermione opened her mouth to object, but quickly realized she didn’t really have a leg to stand on, considering that was exactly what Harry had done; and worse, that she hadn’t really paused to even consider what Snape had said; the merits of just going straight to the source to ask. 

“Look, if you don’t want to talk about it, it’s not really any of our business,” she said weakly, realizing that it was probably a little too late for that particular phrase, true as it may be. 

“Quite the opposite, Madam Granger,” Snape corrected her, but without malice. “It is, quite literally, exactly your business to know the character of the man whom you would potentially be entrusting this project to. It is entirely within your purview to vet me thoroughly, as someone who would be the researching mind behind one of the first projects your foundation would offer a grant to. One would want to be quite certain to avoid embarrassing mistakes with such a remarkable endeavour.”

Hermione nodded, for some reasoning swallowing. Yes, she knew that all this was true; but still, she felt somewhat like the sneaking first year she had been, rather than the lawyer and civil rights advocate she had become.

“True,” she said simply, and tried to will herself not to blush. 

Snape simply nodded, and continued: 

“You have my word, Madam Granger, that I am thoroughly committed to my recovery.”

“And how,” she asked, forcing down the awkwardness of prying into a man’s life to such an extent, “exactly does that commitment to recovery manifest?”

Snape held out his hand to take back the coin he had given her, and turned it around in his fingers musingly as he gave her a slow response. 

“I’ve had this chip since ten years ago, when I lost the first one I had after that particularly unfortunate incident where I was photographed passed out drunk in Diagon alley and the photo plastered all over the front page of the Daily Prophet.” 

Snape shrugged. 

“I guess it was a slow news day if “drunken man remains a drunk” is really considered news.”

Hermione found herself not certain whether or not to laugh at this rather sardonic, dry statement. 

“And no, that was not my last set of shenanigans, as Harry’s investigating has probably already since proved.

“My last really good, really deep relapse nearly killed me. I honestly think I would have died if I hadn’t been picked up by the bobbies and thrown in the drunk tank for the night. And yes, with all the other drunk Muggles. I was in no shape to use a wand.

“In the morning, I was let out, and later I was released with no charges by their judicial system; turns out, Muggle U.K. is a bit ahead of where the wizarding world was in terms of its judicial system, and it was my first offense, and merely a misdemeanour at that.

“But before I left that courthouse, I spoke with a case worker, as a part of my plea deal: and she offered me, that if I wanted to, and only if I wanted to, I could voluntarily go to a rehab for thirty days. And so-” Snape shrugged, as if it were no big deal, “Having nothing left to lose, I thought, why not? I might as well give it a try.

“I’ve been sober ever since. Ten years now.”

There was a quiet pride to his voice at that. 

“It worked?” Hermione asked awkwardly. 

“Muggles really are ages ahead of the wizarding world when it comes to mental health, Madam Granger,” Snape answered. “They have things like free, peer-run support groups. Like counselling; and day programs. Like medications for mental health; and yes, like state-paid rehab centres for those of us who have truly hit a place where our life has become unmanageable.” 

The words had a ring to it, as if repeated many times. 

“To answer your question with a rather tired phrase; it works if you work it.”

Hermione nodded slowly. 

“So it’s an active process,” she summarised. 

Snape nodded. 

“If you don’t mind, Madam Granger, yielding to me for a moment, the use of my desk?”

They traded their positions rather awkwardly in the office, and he turned to shuffle through some papers in his desk drawer. 

Hermione stared at the page he handed her; it had several names and their phone numbers associated. 

“Those are the names of two men who sponsored me, and one with whom I run a local A.A. group—alcoholics anonymous,” he added, but she did already know the term. “They can attest to you that I am dedicated to my recovery, that I am serious. And that I’ve gone from a place of tenuous recovery to a place of service; and committed myself to also helping others who have this terrible disease. And yes, they are all non-magical, so please do not confuse them by asking about anything related to Potions or our rather insulated world.”

Hermione found herself wordless for a moment. She didn’t know what to be struck by more; that he had matter-of-factly disclosed all of this to her, or that he had been prepared for the questions, references in hand about such a personal issue. Or that the references were all Muggles, from a Muggle-run and Muggle-founded peer support group.

“I wasn’t expecting this,” she said weakly. “It’s rather a lot of self-disclosure.”

Snape merely settled back into the chair, and crossed one leg over the other, swivelling away from the desk and towards her. 

“As I said, Madam Granger,” he said drily. “It really is my worst-kept secret. And even without Harry’s rather extreme, although understandable, tendencies towards thorough investigation, the wizarding world is small, and likes to gossip. I had no doubt you would have already known about most, if not all, of what I’ve already said. And it’s understandable, necessary even, for you both to seek to protect this foundation at its nascence by ensuring the first grantee will not go off with your grant money and spend it all on booze and empty promises.”

Hermione nodded slowly. 

Snape’s very public downfall into drunken stupour after the war had indeed been part of the reason why Harry had asked her to investigate the issue personally. 

While they had both heard only good things about Snape’s sobriety in the last decade, and his growing body of professional accomplishments also spoke to his recovery; well, there was nothing to be done for it, perhaps, other than to have this rather awkward conversation they were currently engaged in before Harry and the board were ready to sign his name to the dotted line. 

“I hadn’t known whether or not you would be interested,” Snape said the words slowly, and for the first time since he had seen her with the book in her hands he sounded somewhat uncertain. “Or if you would find it professionally appropriate. But I do wish you to know how seriously I take my recovery, and how seriously I take the hope of this foundation. Harry is truly starting something unique here, something transformative. And I would be beyond honoured to be the recipient of the foundation’s first grant. You need to be certain of how seriously I take this endeavour. And given my reputation, I think it is fair; so I will make the offer. Would you like to accompany me to my home group tonight? I am celebrating my tenth year of sobriety this very evening.”

Hermione tried her best not to appear totally shocked. 

“Home group?” She asked, lost. 

“My apologies, Madam Granger,” Snape straightened up and suddenly sounded more certain, a touch more of the professional shining through. “Of course, you wouldn’t know the terminology, or its significance. It is the group to which I attend most regularly, where my sponsor goes, and I where I also sponsor several others. A sponsor is a relationship rather like a mentor who helps to guide one through the ongoing recovery process; but it is entirely voluntary and based in a volunteer, peer-lead organization. No money ever changes hands for these services. I run the group on Wednesdays, and tonight is an open group, so that we can celebrate several milestones in the company of any of the wider public who wishes to attend. One of these milestones is my own ten year recovery. There is a small ceremony, although I assure you it is quite informal, and we give one another chips much like I initially showed you, to mark the milestones we have met.”

Hermione considered it. 

Of all the things she had ever imagined discovering on this journey, Snape attending a Muggle support group to maintain his recovery from alcoholism was not one that she had put on the list. No—not just attending—actually running one. And being open about it. And inviting her to see it; quite simply put, the fates were so strange sometimes that she could only re-justify her complete disregard for Divination on a regular basis, but today even more so than usual. 

Well, she was in a strange town with nothing else to do, and a mandate from Harry to ensure whether or not Snape had become someone they could trust with their grant; what better way to find out than this? 

It was, as Snape himself had reminded her, quite literally her job to know how deeply he could be trusted. 

“I will gratefully accept your offer,” Hermione said, trying not to sound too stiff. “And congratulations on your milestone.”


	3. Bowling with the Enemy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editted for content on Feb 2/20 and then again on Feb 6/20

The meeting was much as Snape had described it. Dr. Pomfrey sat beaming and clapping as different Muggles of all ages announced their milestones and accepted their chips. Snape himself was only one of several different people who accepted their chip with a smile and a brief speech on who had supported them in their sobriety, which Hermione noted with interest included all Muggles, other than Dr. Pomfrey. 

Snape had a cell phone, and texted frequently on it with his students and Muggle colleagues. He was a part of a faculty bowling team and practiced karate. He used computers and lab equipment extensively, and even taught other Muggles to do so as well. And, from his simple but heartfelt speech at A.A., she had the impression that his closest supports were non-magical people.

He was invited out at the end of the meeting to watch a film at a local theatre with a number of the other celebrants. Hermione waved him on to enjoy his evening and apparated back to the flat, thoughtful.

Hermione was beginning to get the impression that Snape was more involved in the Muggle world than the magical one. 

She packed her bags that night and Floo called Harry from the flat. 

“So how’s Northern B.C.?” he asked her. 

“Cold, snowy, and sparsely populated,” she answered grumpily. 

Harry just laughed.

“Sounds perfect for hiding a magical school,” he said. 

“That’s the thing, Harry,” Hermione frowned. “The Nisga’a really do things differently here. The school is right in the same building as the Muggle university.”

Harry’s forehead creased in thought. 

“Interesting,” he said. “I still think Wizarding U.K. would rather eat their own hat rather than do that. And that’s despite all the progress that’s been made over the past 15 years.”

“I know,” Hermione agreed. “They really are a lot more integrated into the Muggle world here.”

“Who would have ever thought. Snape is living more closely with Muggle world than we are.”

“You don’t know the half of it, Harry. He has a cell phone, and he uses it all the time. His references are half Muggles, and he works with them closely. He practices karate in the Muggle world. And in the rest of his spare time? He is on a bowling league. A bowling league, Harry.”

Harry blinked at her several times and then promptly burst into laughter. 

“Hermione, are you kidding me?”

“I swear to you, I’m not, Harry!”

They were both laughing now, the fire tickling Hermione’s face in strange ways as tears of laughter ran down her cheeks. 

“The great and mighty Severus Snape, bowling.” Harry chuckled. 

“And he isn’t even that great at it, Harry!” Hermione was howling now as a fresh wave of laughter took over her. “His team came in last several years in a row, apparently.” 

“Oh Merlin,” Harry sighed, wiping the tears of laughter away. “If you would have told me that while we were at Hogwarts, I don’t even know what I would have done. Neville would have had whole new inspiration for his Boggart.”

“You have no idea how many times I have thought exactly that over the last two days.”

They both composed themselves somehow.

“So are you coming home tomorrow?”

“Yeah, I’ll be Portkeying in several jumps across the continent tomorrow, and then across the Atlantic.”

“Ugh, that sounds completely dreadful, Hermione.”

“It is,” she shuddered. “I have developed a whole new respect for international mail carriers, let me tell you that.”

“And are we going to be reporting to the board next Wednesday that our recommendation is that our first foundation grant is going to Severus Snape, bowling league loser?”

Hermione sobered. 

“Harry, there’s really no competition. The man is a prodigy. And you should see the stack of preliminary research he handed me yesterday. He and Dr. Pomfrey are so far beyond the standard of the other grant potentials that they make the others look like they’re still studying for their O.W.L.s None of the other candidates did any preliminary research, let alone the sheer massive amounts of data that he and Dr. Pomfrey crunched. But that’s where their use of computers has really set them ahead of everyone else. The rest of the wizarding world is going to have to start embracing these technologies, or you better believe that Dr. Pomfrey and Dr. Snape are going to be getting all of the grants from our foundation for the next twenty years.”

“Well let’s pray the rest of them catch on sooner rather than later, then. I can respect the man for what he’s accomplished, but I can’t ever really imagine liking him, Hermione.”

“You might be surprised, Harry. People change.”

Harry sighed. 

“So Dumbledore always said.”

Hermione snorted. 

“By Morgana’s heart, Harry, don’t ever compare me to that man again or I’ll hex your balls right into your ears.”

Both she and Harry had developed rather complicated feelings towards Dumbledore as they had gotten older. Her feelings had really embraced a downturn for the worse around the time her eldest daughter entered Hogwarts for the first time and she looked at little eleven year old Rose, her small body and sharp mind and imagined that was the same year she and Harry and Ron had, unsupervised, faced off a three headed dog, a deadly plant, a potentially lethal enchanted chess set, and oh, yes, the possessed body of their teacher while the supposed adults of the school ran around doing God knows what. 

The easiest reform she had ever pushed for was the opening of Hogwarts for parental visits every weekend. 

It turns out, former Death Eaters resented the school being targeted by Voldemort just as much as the rest of them did. 

“All right,” Harry conceded, throwing his hands up. “But I shall not speak ill of the dead. Do you and Ron want to come over sometime this weekend?”

Harry had been rattling around like a bird in a gilded cage since Ginny had left him two months after dropping off their youngest, Lilly, at Hogwarts for her first year. He had quit his job as an Auror recently, and ever since, he had been spinning. 

“Sunday I think should be all right,” she agreed. Ron would be home Friday from Jamaica and the two of them had plans to relax together and then plan for her upcoming graduation ceremony.

They ended the Floo call and as Hermione drifted off to sleep, the words seemed to tickle again at her brain: Never let anyone underestimate you. 

She had been sitting in the living room of her small flat with Ron. They had just recently given birth to Hugo, and by some miracle, both the children were sleeping when an owl came to knock at their window. 

They were collapsed into each other’s arms, the dirty dishes left untouched in the sink, and Ron groaned loudly at the noise. 

But its tapping was persistant. 

“You or me, babe?” he asked her, sinking further into the couch. 

“Oh, Merlin, you,” Hermione sighed, pushing his arm off her shoulder playfully. “I’ve been breastfeeding Ron, breastfeeding. You owe me this one.”

Ron chuckled at stood up. 

“That’s fair enough,” he said amicably, and made his way to the window. “So long as I never have to breastfeed a young fiend in my entire life I will open all the windows for the owls you need me to for the rest of my life.”

“I know who’s getting the sweet end of that deal,” Hermione sighed, but Ron just laughed and ambled back to the couch as a nervous young owl flew into the flat and flapped around for a while before settling on Hermione’s knee. 

There wasn’t much else space for him to land on. 

Hermione took the parchment off the pouch on his leg and look at it in interest. 

“Oh, Ron, look! It’s one of those new spelled parchments that you can send messages to people instaneously, and it will show up on both of your scrolls!”

Ron settled back next to her on the couch as she unrolled it. 

“Who’s it from?” he asked curiously. “Is it Harry?”

Hermione was gaping at the familiar writing on the scroll. 

_Dear Madam Granger. I was hoping you would afford me a moment of your time to write back to me about a matter of some mutual academic interest, at your convenience. Sincerely, Severus Snape._

“It’s Snape!” She said incredulously. 

“Snape?” Ron was leaning over her shoulder. “What does that drunken git want?”

Hermione was fumbling for a quill. 

“No better time than the present to find out,” she said, and set the scroll down on the coffee table in front of her. 

_Dear Professor Snape,_ she wrote, and then chewed on the end of her quill. No, he wasn’t a professor anymore. She scratched it out, and the words disappeared. 

The little owl hooted at her inquisitively. 

“Oh!” Hermione said, looking as the owl shifted from one leg to the other. “I guess we don’t need the owl any more. Can you send him to the window for me, Ron?”

“Whatever my darling needs, don’t worry about my sore feet,” Ron responded sweetly. Hermione snorted and shooed him off, but Ron just laughed and lead the little owl to the window as Hermione debated how to proceed.

_Dear Master Snape. I am curious as to what academic interests we may have in common. What are you referring to? Sincerely, Hermione Granger._

She tapped the parchment with her wand and the message shifted off the page. 

The response came almost immediately. 

_Dear Madam Granger. I am grateful for your prompt response. I am currently researching the uses of injections with potions. It was you who so ingeniously invented this field. I owe you the results of this work in more ways than I can say. I am wondering if you would like to be included in any future patents that may result from these findings, and what percentage of profits you may be interested in taking from any of the injectables I may find.. Sincerely, Severus Snape._

Hermione stared at the words incredulously. Patents? Profits? On an invention she had never even see? For research she wasn’t even marginally involved in? He was talking like he owed her some kind of blood debt, when any decent human being would have done the best they could to keep a man from dying. 

She thought back to that horrible night, the blood pouring from the wounds in Snape’s neck as she gathered his memories into her test tube. She had instructed Harry to staunch the wounds, but there was so much blood; she had gritted her teeth and whispered the spell for mending, hoping it would work on the gaping hole in his neck. 

She was sweating, and Ron was urging her to leave, but she couldn’t leave a man to die in abandoned shack, no matter what his loyalties were, and why, if he knew they were there, hadn’t he betrayed them?

She muttered “ _accio medicinus_ ”, waving her wand at her bag, and gasped when several potions, and a syringe filled with epinephrine landed in her outstretched hand.

She had sworn that she could make herself stab the epinephrine into Harry or Ron’s chest, that she would do what she must to protect those she loved, pump electricity in steady waves through their heart, that she would get them to a Muggle hospital if she had to, so help her! She was prepared, dammit, and if it came to that she would still do it…. But now she saw another desperate opportunity had presented itself to her, in the form of a dark green bottle, the antidote to Nagini’s venom. 

She tapped her wand to it, and the epinephrine and the potion switched. She stabbed the syringe into Snape’s neck, gasping as the potion swelled into a bulge at his jugular. 

The bleeding stopped. 

He was still breathing. 

“Now Hermione,” Ron hissed at her, and she covered Snape with her cloak, and called to Winky to bring him to the Great Hall to Poppy…

She blew out, leaving the memory in the past where it belonged. It rankled her sense of justice that Snape would suggest she take profits from something she hadn’t really done anything about for the past five years. 

_Thank you,_ she wrote back hesitantly, _but I really don’t need any credit. What I did for you was an act of desperation, and I’m glad it succeeded, but it was hardly rigorous research. There’s no need to include me in any of the patents for your work._

Ron was squawking at that. 

“Hermione!” he protested, reading over her shoulder as she wrote, “We’re talking big money here! If Snape wants to give you money for saving his life, why not just take it and walk away?”

But Hermione tapped her wand against the parchment already. 

“Because, Ron,” she said simply, “It’s not right, that’s why.”

Ron sat back into the couch and sighed. 

“Ever the sense of justice, eh Hermione?” but his tone was warm.

“Always,” Hermione agreed absently. A response was already shifting onto the paper:

_Are you quite certain? You more than deserve it._

The parchment dinged quietly with each response, but Ron was too exhausted to shift forward to read it. 

“What’s he saying now?” Ron asked. 

“Oh, he’s trying to convince me otherwise,” Hermione answered. 

Ron snorted. 

“Good luck to him,” he muttered. Hermione smiled in recognition of that truth. 

_No, thank you,_ she wrote back more firmly this time. _It really was a miracle that what I did worked at all, but it’s not like I thought much about it before I did it. It could have just as easily hastened your death._

A response dinged again, but Hermione was getting tired of this argument with a paper. 

_Never underestimate yourself, Miss Granger._ The response was immediate. _You did more than what you give yourself credit for. I fear unscrupulous others would take advantage of you if you cannot see your own worth._

“Hmmm!” Hermione snorted. “I’m back to being a Miss again, Ron!”

She glared at the page and lifted it off the desk in front of her. 

Ron peeked an eye open and saw her expression. 

“Guess that conversation was short lived,” he said mildly. 

“That arrogant arse!” Hermione raged as she read it again. “He’s implying I’m naïve and gullible! And he’s trying to convince me to change my mind by insulting me! Remind me, Ron, the many reasons why I never want to speak to this guy again if he ever dares to owl me again!”

She crumpled up the note and threw it in the fire. 

They both jumped as it made a loud crack. 

One of the babies mewled a bit in their sleep, but thank God, went back to quiet, or she really might have to contemplate the merits of murdering Severus Snape. 

Ron was starting to laugh. 

“Mione?”

“Mmmm?”

“What do you think happens on his end when you throw a charmed paper into the fire?”

“Oh, God! Ron! I didn’t think of that!”

They both looked at each other and dissolved into helpless giggles. 

And Hermione hadn’t thought any more of it in the years since. 

The memory dissolved, but the words echoed with a different tone in her head, remembering the words on the bottom of the article Dr. Pomfrey had written to Severus:

_To Sev,_

_Just like you’re always telling me, never underestimate yourself. Helena._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi faithful readers! I hope you enjoy my editting journey. ;) I've significantly reworked the beginning of this work to try and get the pace a bit faster. I hope any who come back to this fic later find watching the evolution of this work to be an interesting a process as I find writing it has been!


	4. Forgiveness versus Permission

She woke up to a firecall earlier the next morning than she had really anticipated. She was home after a gruelling day of Portkey trips, having departed B.C. in the morning after strongly hinted to Snape and Dr. Pomfrey that they were the top contenders for the grant. 

Snape had pulled her aside before she left, warning her of his limitations as a recovering alcoholic, but as much as she appreciated the honesty, she had brushed these off. He had convinced her he would be more than capable of managing the responsibility.

She groaned as she saw Ron’s face flickering green in the hearth in their bedroom. 

“Mione?” he called, “You finally awake?”

“Merlin’s balls, Ron,” she grumbled, getting up and sitting in front of the green sparkling hearth. “I was not ready to be awake yet.”

“I called you about five times already! It took a long time before you finally answered.”

“It’s called sleep, Ron,” she muttered, rubbing her bleary eyes. “Some of us happen to need it after 13 different portkey transportations in the same day.”

Ron shuddered in sympathy. 

“Sorry, love, I guess I didn’t think of that.”

“It’s all right,” Hermione sighed, “I guess.” She blinked a couple of times and looked closer at him. He looked ridiculously awake considering the hour it must be in Jamaica at that time. His eyes sparkled with more than just the light of the flames. She could vaguely see wizards in the background talking and laughing and playing what looked like some kind of card game.

“You look like you’re having a great time,” she said hesitantly, “But Ron? I’m not the only one that’s gonna have to make a whole ton of portkey transportations in an unreasonable amount of time. And remember, you have the time change to deal with too. If you’re going to get here in time for tonight, you’re going to have to leave really soon, Ron. Remember? We talked about this?”

“Umm, yeah, Hermione, that’s sort of why I’m calling…”

Hermione felt herself tense. 

“Things are going really great here, but the guys have found another potential lead, and my boss wants me to keep heading the team. And you know I’m getting more and more recognition from the department and I don’t want to mess that up, and it’s really big opportunity…” he trailed off. “Hermione, I want to stay for another week.”

It was a story that was becoming too familiar. She could practically hear Snape’s voice in her ear, telling her that most employers expected their employees to work themselves to the bone with no questions asked.

“Another week?” she asked, her voice rising. 

“Umm, yeah,” Ron said. 

She felt tears of frustration well in her eyes. 

“What is it? Babe?” Ron asked. “I mean, I know it’s unexpected, but we can get through it. The kids are all in school now, so you don’t really need me around that bad. And, ugh, I sorta already told my boss that I would, so he’s expecting it now, and Henderson has already portkeyed halfway back to Britain, so if I back out now they’re gonna be mad at me and have to find someone else…Babe?”

Hermione realized the tears were actually running down her cheeks now. 

“You don’t remember, do you?” she asked. She almost felt on the verge of laughter. “You don’t even goddamn remember.”

Ron gawped at her. She noticed the crowd in the background had gone still, and then started emptying out of the room. 

She brushed at her tears in frustration. 

“Bloody hell, Ron, sometimes, for an Auror, you can be so damn clueless.”

His face was getting red; she could tell even through the green flames. 

“Fine,” Ron snapped. “Let’s say I’m clueless. Can you help me out here, Babe? What did I forget this time that’s so bloody important.”

Hermione blew out her breath all at once. She really hated it when Ron called her Babe when they were fighting. 

“My graduation ceremony,” she managed. “It’s on Tuesday. I signed the kids out of school so they could come too, and everything. We have a reservation at a fancy restaurant in London for afterwards, for just the two of us, and Harry agreed to watch the kids for the evening and Floo them back to school in the morning.”

Tears of frustration were rising in her eyes again. 

“Oh,” Ron said. “Oh, ugh, no I didn’t forget.”

Hermione blinked. 

“You didn’t?” she asked, feeling slightly hopeful for the first time in this conversation. “Oh. Wow. I’m sorry Ron, I shouldn’t have blown up at you. I just thought you forgot, and you know how important it is to me, and wow, you’re going to Portkey all the way here and then back again just to come to my ceremony? That’s insane, even for you.”

She wiped away the tears again. 

“Shit, hun, I’m so sorry for yelling. I guess I’m just in a bad mood from all that travelling. Forgive me, okay?”

But Ron was looking away from the fire.

“Ugh, Babe?

Hermione felt herself tensing again. 

She knew that tone of voice. That was Ron’s you are not going to like what I have to say voice, but I am saying it anyway, and whether you yell, scream, or cry, I am not going to change my opinion.

“I sort of cancelled our reservation already. I didn’t want us to lose the deposit, and I’m not going to be able to make it.”

Hermione realized she simply didn’t have anything to say and stared at the floor before her in stoney silence. 

“Babe?” her husband’s voice was calling from the fire. 

Hermione sighed a very deep, very long sigh and reminded herself that this was the man whom she had married in a small ceremony in his parent’s back yard when she was 18 years old. 

And when she was an improbable combination of being both naïve as she had been world weary, and wanted nothing more than to have some semblance of stability restored to her life. 

“I’m still here, Ron,” she said thinly. “What else is on your mind.”

She managed not to make it sound completely cutting somehow. 

“I didn’t realize it was so important to you. I honestly wouldn’t have come if I had realized. I’m really sorry, okay? You told me the ceremony would be really small, and you’re already practicing as a lawyer for years now, this is just one more credential for you to add to a stack that’s already really high, and I didn’t realize it was this important to you that I was there…” he trailed off. “And it’s months after you already finished your schooling and we celebrated as soon as we knew you had passed? So I didn’t figure that the ceremony itself was that big of a deal to you.”

Hermione sighed. 

“All that’s true Ron. It’s just that after that ceremony I’ll officially be a doctor of law, and before I wasn’t. It’s a big milestone, even though nothing much practically changes in either of our lives. It’s just a recognition of all the hard work I’ve done. My parents and your parents are going to be there, and the kids, and Harry…”

She trailed off, staring at the fire. 

Ron was swallowing. 

“I know I screwed up, Babe, I’m sorry. I just don’t think I can really get out of this one with my boss and have him still trust me.”

Hermione rubbed her temples. 

“That’s true, Ron,” she agreed. 

“So…” his voice trailed off, “I’ll see you next weekend instead then?”

She felt tears come to her eyes again despite herself. 

She hated it when she angry cried. 

“Yeah, I guess we will.”

“Thanks love, you’re the best. Love ya.”

“Love you too,” Hermione answered automatically, and stepped back from the fire as the flames switched from green to their normal flickering white-red. 

She collapsed back against the floor and groaned in frustration, cursing the air blue for a while. 

She then got up, wiped away her tears, and thought about exactly what she was going to tell her parents and the Weasleys about this. 


	5. Recreation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More canon divergences are revealed.
> 
> Editted January 26/20 for style but not substance.

Harry woke up before the sunlight started to make its slow creep in through the bay windows of the bedroom he and Ginny had once shared. 

It was a grey and damp winter, and Harry was used to waking up while it was still dark outside so he supposed he shouldn’t be surprised that despite his newfound freedom, his eyes popped open automatically at 6 AM. His normal routine, for the past 15 years, was to wake at 5 in the morning, eat a slow breakfast, and apparate to the office by 6. 

He worked 12 hour days, four days a week, for the past ten years. More, sometimes, if he was working internationally to pursue rumours of a fleeing Death Eater.

He rolled over in bed and reflected that he had absolutely no idea what to do with his time now that he was officially unemployed. 

He stared up at the still dark ceiling, receding into dark shadows high above him andd wondered if he would be able to get back to sleep. 

He groaned. 

It was no use. 

He had been an insomniac since he was 12 years old. 

He threw on his slippers and wandered to the empty kitchen.

He and Ginny had always kept opposite schedules, so at least it didn't seem too odd to be making tea and fixing himself a breakfast without her. 

The demise of their relationship had come as slowly and inevitably as a freight train pulling into its destination.

They were so young when they had married. 

Harry wondered, looking back, if he had been hoping for a sense of family, some way to affirm his ties to the Weasleys. 

And with Hermione and Ron getting engaged so soon, he would gain a brother and a sister-in-law, both his best friends. 

He wanted that more than he wanted anything in life.

And he and Ginny got along fabulously; they could spend hours just talking and laughing about nothing, playing Quidditch, teasing each other behind the elaborate layered chocolate drinks Ginny loved so much when Harry concocted. 

She was shy about physical affection outside of cuddling or touching but they often held each other. Harry felt as if a piece of his soul, long missing, was coming back home to him as he held her warm body next to his as the early morning light teased against his eyelids. 

Her shy kisses brushing softly against his lips felt like a promise of a future he could never have dared to imagine.

He felt no reason to rush anything, and neither did she. 

He had hardly had a normal childhood, and he supposed that perhaps this is what courting was supposed to be like, long lingering moments of tracing lazy lines along her face, clasping her hand to his heart as they smiled wordlessly at each other, finally care free in a way he had never known before. 

Ron and Hermione were married immediately after the war, but he and Ginny had waited for two years, and then it just seemed like the most natural thing in the world to hold hands and make their vows by the stream in France where Fleur and Bill loved to take them on holidays. 

They had never made love before, but Harry didn’t think it odd. He had no context to wonder if other witches and wizards would have thought it strange to wait until they were married, and he could hardly ask Ron. 

He was young enough to think talking to Hermione about it would have just been embarrassing.

And anyway, he thought it was sweet; an old fashioned courtship that he later would most remember as being filled with the felt-sense of light dappling on leaves, of the smell of leaves crackling under their feet, of the sound of Ginny’s careless laugh as they chased each other through forests, for once seeking careless adventures and not running towards or away from danger. 

He had unclasped her wedding robes with trembling fingers, slowly, gently, patiently, the way he had always touched her. It was the first time he had sought out the places she had always hidden from him. 

Her eyes had widened, her lips had opened, their robes had fallen to the floor. 

A magic that seemed older than words passed between them and he knew absolutely, that he was making love to his best friend.

She got pregnant on the honeymoon.

When she told him, a blush creeping across her cheeks, that she thought she was expecting twins, he felt a grin crack across his face, tears shimmer in his eyes.

It was more than he could have ever dreamed for.

He didn’t think it odd that they didn’t make love very often. First, she was pregnant with twins. 

Then, they were busier than he could have ever imagined, both of them kept up to ridiculous hours of the night, soothing tears, wiping bums, cooing sweet lullabies and trying to ignore their sore shoulders.

And when they had trouble making love, when it seemed that he always wanted sex more often than she? 

Well, plenty of couples had that problem, and so he pushed it away, and focused his energy on being an attentive father and on building their friendship to be even stronger.

It was when Ginny was glued to their tv around the time that the Netherlands was deciding on whether or not to legalize gay marriage that he began to realize something was up. 

They both cried when she told him she had only realized after their third child was born that a wife should have more feelings for her husband than just the feelings of loving friendship she had for him. 

They went to counselling. 

They still vowed to make it work, until one evening Ginny had come home from a Quidditch game, her hair tied back in a neat ponytail, biting her lip.

“I kissed Katie Bell in the locker room”

Everything went completely silent, and then all at once, sound came rushing back in, the ticking of the grandfather clock on their dresser, that had been a gift from Ginny’s parents for their wedding. 

Harry discovered, suddenly, with a twisting feeling in his gut, that there were things he could not let go. 

He had thought they could get through anything together. 

“Harry?” She said, as he turned away from her, staring at that stupid clock, its pendulating arms. “Harry!”

He turned away from her and stalked towards the door. He thought maybe she was trying to follow him, but he slammed the door behind him, and the door to their back yard.

He didn’t know exactly where he was going, but he found himself sitting on a bench, staring at a water park where they’d take the kids when they got too rangy in the hot weather.

“Let’s get the little beasts outside and out of my hair,” Harry would say, and Ginny would giggle.

They would run outside in the sprinklers while he and Ginny ate grapes and talked about their week. 

“I kissed Katie Bell in the locker room” she’d said. As if Harry had never had to steal his kisses from her. As if kisses were something she could hardly contain, rather than something Harry had to coax out of slowly, gently, patiently. As if it had been a moment of passion, of inevitability.

He stared at the leaves sodden on the bare cement and wondered if he should go back home that night or not. 

But the kids would worry if he didn’t.

He walked back to their large house on the edge of town slowly, his stomach tight. 

The kids were already in bed when he got home, and Ginny was sitting in front of the fire, staring at it with a nervous expression on her face. 

He sat down in a chair next to her heavily. 

Neither of them said anything for a while. 

The fire cackled loudly, and Ginny flinched. 

“Look,” he said shortly, “You deserve to be happy.”

For some reasons that made tears begin to roll down her cheeks and the silence between them was broken. 

“Harry,” she said brokenly, and reached towards him. 

He hesitated, but took his hand, just like he always had, and they looked into each other’s eyes. 

“What now?” Ginny whispered, and the question hung between them. 

They agreed to wait until Lilly went to Hogwarts for her first year before separating. 

It had been three months and a bit since September, and the house still felt empty without her. 

***

Harry went to the living room and stared at the skis that had made him realize as a war hero the Auror's prize mascot, he could get away with literal murder and no one would question him. That had been the day, a mere week ago, that he had handed in his resignation. 

He had mounted the skis above the fireplace to remind him that if no one else was going to hold him accountable, he had best hold himself accountable. 

He glared at the skis, which seemed to be snoozing in the lulling warmth of the fire. 

“Thanks to you, I don’t have a job anymore,” he told the skis accusingly, as he drank his tea.

The skis eyes popped open and responded without missing a beat. 

“Sounds like you’re going to need something to do,” they said smugly. 

“I’m bored already!” Harry admitted, burying his face in his hands. “And it’s not even day break out yet.”

“Well,” the skis said slyly, “You could always go for a ski.”

Harry opened his mouth to argue, and then stopped. 

What else did he have to do?

He shrugged, transfigured himself a snow suit, took the skis off the wall, and Apparated with a crack to a ski hill he and Ginny had taken the kids to last Christmas holiday in the Alps.

***

Skiing was not Harry’s forte. 

“At least it’s quiet here,” the skis said as Harry face planted for the third time that morning. “If you were learning to ski on a crowded hill, you could really hurt yourself. Or worse, hurt someone else. You definitely would have hit someone by now.” 

“Not reassuring,” Harry objected, hauling himself to his feet again.

The skis paused in consideration, and then seemed to give up.

“Look,” they said, “at this rate, you’re going to break your neck. And I will not be held liable for breaking the neck of the Boy Who Lived.”

“Twice,” Harry added automatically. 

“Right,” the skis said agreeably. “The Boy Who Lived Twice. The point being, unless you want to try for defying death thrice, why don’t you let me transform into a pair of cross country skis, and you can take the trails through the woods I saw at the bottom of the mountain. Less hills, less chance of death.”

“You can do that?” Harry asked in surprise. 

The skis snorted in derision and promptly transfigured. 

“Wait!” Harry protested. “I have to get to the bottom of this hill first!”

He stared down the snow-covered hill in trepidation, looking at all the trees along the sides of the path. 

The skis looked at Harry with the wryest look of derision he had ever seen from an enchanted object. 

Harry scratched his nose. 

“Er, right,” he said, and Apparated with a crack to the bottom of the hill into a dense thicket of trees where he wouldn’t be noticed. 

He struggled through the thick snow, grumbling all the while. 

“Not exactly better,” he gasped, as he sank up to his knees. 

“I didn’t say to come into untended snow,” the skis hissed in response. “You were supposed to go to a groomed trail where you wouldn’t have this problem.”

“What, and Apparate right into the middle of a group of Muggles?”

They continued to grumble at each other as Harry tried a number of weightening charms on the snow, struggling to haul himself out of the soft powder and breaking thick branches that poked against him as he went. 

He stumbled inelegantly out of the thicket and into a clearing, where a bundled figure was holding a pair of binoculars at her chest, and gaping in surprise. 

“Harry?” she called.

Harry stared at the figure, her long blond hair spilling out her hat in an unmistakeable wave of silver-white. 

“Luna!” he called, and fought his way across the clearing. 

Luna giggled, whispered a charm, and slid gracefully across the snow to meet him. 

They grinned at each other. 

The scar that slashed its way across Luna’s right eye down to her lip had always left her grin a bit lopsided, but Harry knew his friend well enough to know how pleased she was. 

“What are you doing here?” he blurted out. “I thought you were in Australia, hunting bunyip”

“Oh, I was,” Luna agreed blithely. “But it turns out that I was upsetting the balance of power between them and the Muldjewangk, and so I decided to come back here to research invisible nargles instead. I didn’t want to accidentally off a territorial dispute.”

She blinked at him with the one eye that was still able to blink. 

“But anyway, Harry, I could ask you the same thing. Aren’t you supposed to be at work?”

Harry shrugged. 

“Quit just yesterday,” he said matter of factly. 

“Finally,” Luna responded without missing a beat. “I was hoping you’d do that years ago.” 

Harry laughed. Luna always was completely unflappable. 

They chatted and laughed with each other as they skied across the clearing, about how in the world Luna was researching creatures that were invisible 95% of the time, and about Harry’s children. Luna taught Harry the charm that lightened his weight and distributed it more evenly along the snow so that he could ski without sinking up to his knees in the fluff. 

Luna lead him to the tent she had disillusioned in the clearing and the two of them settled into her home away from home with ease. 

His skis hissed wordlessly at him as he spelled them with a bodybind so that they wouldn’t get up to any trouble while he and Luna got caught up, but Harry just hissed back. 

“Harry!” Luna said in delight, peering closer at the skis. “Do those skis speak Parseltongue?”

Trust Luna to figure it out so quickly. 

“Indeed, they do Luna,” he admitted, as he shrugged out of the rest of his snow suit and hung it on the simple hooks in the entrance way to her tent. “Actually, talking with them was what convinced me I should quit my job.”

“How so, Harry?” she asked, beckoning him in through the spelled canvas that separated the entrance way from the rest of her workspace. He slipped in behind her and looked around in amazement. 

He and Ginny and the kids had visited her plenty of times before, spending whole summers with Luna on her travels but there always something new to see every time he came. 

Come to think of it, that he had been able to have months off from his workplace was probably another sign of the favouritism he was automatically granted that he had never really thought about before. 

His boss had always told him it was in place of a bonus, after he had bagged a particularly hard to find Death Eater, and Ron had usually taken the money instead, but now that he was seeing things in a different light, he wondered if the murderous looks he got sometimes from the senior Aurors had more to do with a genuine complaint than the mere jealousy he had attributed it to. 

Luna had completely transformed her tent from the square multi-level house-like contraption she used to have to a domed structure that held her bed and sparse furnishings all in the same room. Strings of photos were hanging up across the dome and he peered at them as Luna went to put a kettle over the wood stove. 

“I realized I’d have to turn in the skis as evidence, and I was worried about whether or not it was ethical to have an enchanted item stripped of its intelligence charms as per department procedure. So I took them home instead. But then I realized my boss let me get away with it, and that made me wonder what else he’d let me get away with. And so I quit.”

Luna was wandering around the room, grabbing dried herbs that were hanging drying by the fire, adding them to the kettle and stirring them with ritualistic motions.

“Absolutely, Harry,” she agreed. “Accountability is important in a job like that. I think you were wise to quit.”

Harry smiled, appreciating that Luna was able to see his point of view so quickly, and let his mind wander to trying to identify the herbs she had drying.

“Do you think it’s possible that a magical item could develop its own personality? And that it could actually be sentient?” he asked her.

“It’s something I’ve often wondered about,” she answered thoughtfully. “We’ll have to carefully study those skis, Harry, it isn’t often that an enchanted object is capable of speech.”

The air smelled pleasingly of lilacs and honey. Harry was feeling more comfortably relaxed by the moment. 

“Are you studying potions, Luna?” he asked her curiously, leaving the photos of bird-like footprints that appeared slowly across the snow and coming to sit at the small table in front of the stove. 

“Only a few, Harry,” she answered calmly, taste testing the tea before nodding once, and taking it off the fire. “I tire more easily with only one leg and figured it was better to teach myself the pain relieving and strengthening potions rather than always have to buy them. Besides, sometimes I’m far away from the closest wizarding villages in my studies, and it’s better to know how to brew them myself than have to take the time away from my studies to go somewhere to buy them.”

“Why not mail order them?”

“Some of the creatures I was studying really developed a taste for owls when Rolf tried that,” Luna answered. 

Harry laughed as Luna waved her wand and the tea pot and its potion was steeping on a small table in front of them. 

Luna snapped her fingers and her wheelchair unfolded and rolled towards her. 

She sat down in it heavily and it rolled her towards the table to sit with Harry. 

She tapped her wand to her pants, and the fabric tore neatly above the top of her left leg. She loosened her prosthetic, taking it off. 

“I still get sore after a morning of intense exercise,” she explained to Harry, taking a jar of powder from the pocket of her long hanging cardigan and sprinkling it over the stump of her upper thigh. “Although all the Healers and the Muggle physiotherapists I’ve ever gone to say I’ve made a remarkable recovery. They say I’m nearly as strong as someone who was born needing an above knee prosthetic.”

Harry looked at the prosthetic she was holding with great interest. 

It was like none he had ever seen before, flesh coloured and in a flexible plastic at the top, but metal after the knob of the artificial knee. The bottom was a rounded shape. 

“Can I see that?” he asked, and she floated it over to him so he could study how the metal flattened into a springy, wide and gentle slope at the bottom. 

Luna was beaming at him. 

“It’s nice that it doesn’t intimidate you,” she said matter of factly. 

Harry frowned. 

“Of course, not, Luna, I’m an adult after all, why should it?”

Luna was smiling but Harry thought she might be blinking back tears at the same time. 

She tapped the side of her wheelchair and it rolled towards him until she was close enough to wrap her arms around him in a tight hug. 

She smelled of the lilacs she had been brewing. 

“Some people are stupid about it,” she explained, and took the prosthetic back from him, and then snapped her fingers, and it disappeared into a knitted pouch hanging next to the fire. 

“It’s nice to have it warmed up,” she explained. 

They went back to their biscuits. 

“So how is Rolf,” Harry asked. “Do you think he’s finally gonna crack and ask you out one of these days?”

Luna shook her head and sighed. 

“I don’t think so, Harry,” she said with a tone of wistfulness in her voice. “I liked him quite a bit, and he’s an amazing magical ecologist, but I don’t think he can see past the, the-- this,” she said, gesturing to the scar across her face. 

Harry studied her face frankly.

Her right eye wasn’t puffy from the injury anymore, although it would never open again. And the scar that ran down her face from her eyebrow to her lip had faded from a deep, angry red to a white mark over the years. 

The Healers had done an excellent job of reattaching her lip in the space the Greyback had torn a chunk out of it before Hagrid had thrown himself between Luna and the werewolf to save her, sacrificing his own life. 

“That’s even more stupid than being intimidated by a prosthetic,” Harry said angrily. “You’re beautiful, Luna. And the scar just shows how brave you are.”

Luna smiled at him again, her eyes shining. 

“That’s even more kind of you because I can tell you mean it,” she said. 

“Of course I mean it, Luna, it’s true,” He answered.

Luna smiled at him again and they switched the subject to talk more about invisible nargles, and how Luna was tracking them based on their feeding patterns, tracks, and their scat. 

“Hence winter is the easiest time to track them,” she explained to Harry.

“Do you think you’ll write another children’s book or a play about them?” Harry asked. 

Luna had written her first children’s book as a gift for Lily Luna, the goddaughter she adored and doted over. 

All three children had loved it, and Hermione had encouraged Luna to publish it. Much to Luna’s surprise, the book had been a hit and was translated into several different languages by the next year. 

Harry’s foundation had started as a way to fund making the book into a play, which had also turned into a huge success; but neither of them made much money on it after all the expenses had been paid. While Harry would have been happy to keep throwing money at Luna’s endeavours out of his own pocket, George had stepped in with a sigh, explaining to Harry that if he kept throwing his money at every worthy cause he found, he would go embarrassingly broke within a decade. 

“And that,” he said sternly, “would never do for my brother-in-law. Imagine what the tabloids would say if you managed to squander your fortune away before you even hit forty.”

Luna, to Harry’s surprise, had listened thoughtfully to George as he drew up the contracts that would take the play national and then global, and then insisted Harry follow them. 

“After all,” she said thoughtfully, looking at George’s plan, “I’m going to need to fund my continuing exploration somehow.”

Harry hated managing money more than he hated the paperwork of being an Auror, and had been more than grateful to throw the machinations of the foundation to George, who was shockingly good at running a business. 

Hermione had encouraged him to take risks with his foundation, and fund art, books, music, and theatre pieces about civil rights and overcoming prejudices. To Harry’s surprise, while some of these were a flop, the success they had gained through the rest of them had turned their fledgling foundation into a powerful force in the wizarding world. 

“Social change,” Hermione said thoughtfully, after watching a play about a werewolf growing up and getting married, “can only come if people begin to see it is needed.”

To Harry it had been a way of sticking it to Wizarding prejudices. 

But he had to admit, the next year Hermione finally managed to get her bill on reducing the price of the Wolfbane potion passed, despite that she had been advocating for that for years. 

“I think I might write something this winter,” Luna said thoughtfully. “But next summer I want to go to the Amazon to study the ley lines there. So I won’t be writing for a while after that. I’ve become fascinated by those magics, and the kinds of creatures that are drawn to them. It will demand all of my focus and I doubt I’ll have any time to write for at least a couple of years.”

Harry nodded. Luna could become quite absorbed in a project, but she was always excellent at taking time away from her studies and her adventures to see her friends.

“What are you doing this winter?” he asked her. 

“Of course, I’ll come see you and Ginny and Hermione,” Luna stated. “But Harry, what about you?”

“Ginny and I want to go to her Mom’s with the kids,” Harry explained, “They’re the closest family I have, and Ron and Hermione and their kids will be there too,” he was blinking back tears. “Molly insists that no matter what has happened, she still considers me a son. And Ginny and I wanted the kids to know that we’re still a united front in parenting, no matter what’s happened between the two of us.”

Luna laid a hand across his arm. 

“Harry,” she said gravely, “I’m so sorry.”

Harry hung his head and let himself blink back tears for a while. 

“It’s okay to cry, Harry,” she said. “It’s a huge loss.”

Harry felt the tears roll down his cheeks despite himself. 

“Do you know,” he said after a while, his voice shakey, “You’re the first person to say that to me.”

Luna blinked incredulously, her eyes owl-like. 

“Why Harry?” she gasped, “Isn’t it obvious?”

“Well, I think it should be,” he answered, not quite caring that his voice sounded a bit angry, “but Ron just reminds me that it’s not her fault that she’s gay, and Hermione keeps trying to make me feel better about it, and I don’t know what’s worse!”

Luna sighed. 

“People get kind of stupid about grief,” she said wisely, and Harry couldn’t help but agree. 

“It’s going to be a hard Christmas for you, Harry,” Luna said soberly. “Are you sure you want to spend all of it with Ginny?”

Harry stopped to consider. The truth, rolling in his gut, was that he really didn’t, but he felt too guilty to say it. 

“I can tell you don’t,” Luna said matter-of-factly, “Why don’t you spend one week with their family, and then bring the kids here for a couple of days without Ginny to celebrate new years. I’ve been missing my goddaughter anyway. I have so many photos to show her.”

Lilly was convinced she was going to be a zoologist or an ecologist or a botanist like her godmother, and travel the world having adventures with her. She would pester Luna for hours for stories, and the two of them were inseparable when they were together. 

“That—might be nice,” Harry agreed hesitatingly. 

“Perfect,” Luna smiled. “Remus will be coming with Teddy, and we can all get caught up.”

Harry nodded, slowly, thinking that it would be the first time in years that he and Remus had spent a holiday together. He was teaching Defense at a day school where the students Flooed in every day in the veldts of Northern South Africa. South Africa had much better civil rights laws than the U.K., and after the second war with Voldemort had been over and the civil rights movement grew, they had been more willing to take a chance hiring a foreign werewolf without worrying about political retaliation. 

“Do you think Ginny will be hurt that I’m not inviting her?” Luna asked with a frown. “I mean, I’ll talk with her about it privately, too, she is a good friend, but it is…. Well, its awkward,” Luna admitted, “I don’t want either of you to think I’m not going to still be friends with you both.” 

“It is awkward,” Harry agreed feelingly, “And to be honest, I think she might take it as an excuse to go see Katie.”

“Katie?” Luna asked hesitatingly. 

“Katie Bell,” Harry confirmed. 

She and Ginny had both been playing Quidditch together for years. 

“Oh Harry,” Luna breathed, her eyes widening. “So soon?”

Harry found himself crumbling the tea biscuit in front of him into smaller and smaller pieces. 

“Yeah,” he muttered, “But it’s, it’s okay, it’s just we wanted to stay together until at least Lilly was in school, we thought it was best for the kids. And at first we thought maybe we could stay together anyway, even though she is a Lesbian, but then she and Katie started playing Quidditch together…” his voice trailed off. 

He heard the particular rolling sound of wheels on wood and found himself again held in Luna’s embrace. 

He sighed and squeezed his eyes shut against the soft feeling of her hair against his forehead. 


	6. Hogwarts, Revisited

That Friday, Harry stopped by Hogwarts in the early afternoon. 

He had joined the board of directors the year before Albus and James were enrolled, for the sole purpose of being able to stop in any time he pleased and make sure that everything was running smoothly at the school. 

He would not have his children going through the same threats he had. 

“Mr. Potter,” a familiar voice rang out in the 7th floor hallway. “To what do I owe this pleasure?”

The tone was slightly drier than what he would like, but he grinned like a school boy at Minerva McGonagall’s still dignified frame. 

“Headmistress,” he greeted her, falling into step beside her as she descended from her quarters. “Just here making sure everything is up to standards,” he said.

McGonagall eyed him sceptically. 

“So, the usual, then,” she said, and seemed to suppress a sigh. 

“Well, Mr. Potter, why don’t I escort you,” she gestured down the corridors. “I’ll take you on your usual tour and answer any questions you may have. After all, even for board members, as I’m sure you can remember, having forwarded these changes yourself, security protocols do dictate that all visiting adults must be accompanied by at least one senior staff member, or a security guard. In fact, Mr. Potter, you should explain to me how you managed to get this far without accompaniment so that we can correct this egregious breach of our security immediately.”

Harry smiled at her. 

“Well, when the security guard at the gate saw it was the famous Mr. Potter, on important board business, he waved me in without further question.”

McGonagall sighed and nodded, rubbing at her eyes. 

“I’ll speak with him personally about it,” she promised him. 

“No need,” Harry assured her. “I am rather famous, you know.”

McGonagall’s lips had gone into a thin line. 

“Nonetheless,” she said firmly, quickening her stride, “As you no doubt highly approve of, we simply cannot have any of our guards being willing to be so careless, no matter what the status of one’s… celebrity.”

Harry had to admit McGonagall was adept at using his own rules against him. He grinned at her. 

“You have to know me well enough by now,” he said to her, “You know I’m never going to retire from the board for as long as my kids are here. You’re going to have to put up with me dropping by at a moment’s notice at least until Lilly graduates.”

A smile flickered across McGonagall’s lips at this frank admission. 

“You’re hardly the first nervous parent I’ve dealt with, Mr. Potter. Although you are one of the more persistant ones, I must concede.”

They headed down the shifting staircase and by the wings to the Ravenclaw tower. 

“How are the portraits coping with the increased security measures we’ve given them?”

“Oh, I think they’re just happy to have a purpose,” McGonagall admitted. “I think some of them were getting rather bored.” 

“And what about the House parents?” he asked. “Do you think there’s enough of them?”

Adding so called House parents to every House had been one of the changes he had been most passionate about. That he had initiated even before James and Albus were a twinkle in his and Ginny’s eyes. It was the year after the Battle of Hogwarts, and he spent most of his weekends at Hogwarts throwing himself into rebuilding his beloved home and getting caught up on the studies he had missed during the war.

He never wanted another child to feel they had no trustworthy adult to talk to again. 

And so he had funded the intiative personally, for the first couple of years. But with the truth and reconciliation commission, part of the reparations from the war involved large percentages of Death Eater coffers being sent to Hogwarts to fund these types of new initiatives. 

Harry and Ron had strongly objected to the creation of the commission. It was one of the only truly terrible fights they’d ever had with Hermione. 

But in the end, Hermione won out. 

“Do you want us to devolve into a reoccurring civil war over the next couple generations?” Hermione had snapped. “Or do you want to rebuild our society? Because if we’re going to rebuild, Harry, we’re going to need to stop thinking just about punishment, and start thinking about reintegration.” 

And so Harry and Ron had reluctantly come around, after insisting that those Death Eaters who had committed war crimes would see prison, whereas those who had only committed the same kinds of acts that could be considered normal in war time would be eligible for the commission, and for alternative justice. 

After all, if Harry Potter could put on dress robes and go in front of the re-established Wizengamot to talk about reconciliation and rebuilding, surely even the hardest-hit families could see the sense of it.

And any of the Death Eaters who had joined underage, or felt coerced by their parents to join had been eligible for the commission, no matter how heinous their crimes had been. 

That had been another screaming fight. 

“These men came of age, and aren’t minors any more. Some of them tortured innocent Muggles, Hermione,” Harry protested. “Tortured!”

“Child soldiers,” Hermione had objected. “Child soldiers!”

He had lost that argument too. 

And he had to admit, the Pureblood families, most of who had been muttering about the good old days, and gathering what Harry had to admit suspiciously looked like vigilante groups, started to come around to sign up for the commission after they realized they would escape prison by doing so. And they passed the bills in the newly formed Wizengamot a lot easier when the old families realized they would not be losing everything they had. 

McGonagall had paused thoughtfully outside the Ravenclaw door. 

“The House Parents have been one of the best additions to our school so far,” McGonagall admitted. “They run recreation groups for the children and escort them on trips to Hogsmeade. But with the additional prefects and having several on-site school counsellors--”

Another change that had been necessary immediately after the war, and shamelessly stolen from the Muggle model—“I think we should be okay, at least for this year. But if our enrolment numbers continue to go up, I’d like to ask that the board consider we hire House parents that are dedicated just to the First years.”

Harry nodded in agreement. 

“It is the toughest year,” he agreed. 

He turned towards the Ravenclaw door. 

“I would like to be let inside,” he said matter of factly to the enchanted knob, as he had done many times in the past. 

“Terribly sorry, Mr. Potter, sir,” the doorknob disagreed. “The dormitories are for students and staff members only.”

“Is there nothing I can do to sweeten the deal? Give you some interesting riddles to ponder over, perhaps?” Harry asked. 

The doorknob snorted in derision. 

“Your riddles are the worst,” it responded, “And even if they were better, the answer is still no,” it added pre-emptively. 

“Very well then,” Harry said agreeably. 

He looked over at McGonagall. 

He had honestly thought she was going to ban him from the castle the first time he did this without giving her warning. 

She sighed as if she were expecting it. 

“Shall I put out a school wide warning, Mr. Potter?” she asked.

“Yes, please,” Harry agreed. 

She tapped her wand to her throat and her voice rang out clearly through the corridors. 

“Attention all students. The following is a drill only. Please follow your classroom protocols and the drill will be over in approximately ten minutes.” 

She glared at him, tapping her throat again, and gestured for him to procede. 

Harry slid his wand out of his wrist guard and grinned wolfishly. 

He began throwing hexes and charms at the door, and even tried banging an axe against it, checking vainly if he could force its way through. 

The door glowed golden against him, but he was working so hard dodging the invisible webs that were falling from the ceilings that he didn’t hear the figure before him until it was too late, and his wand leapt out of his grip. 

He was thrown backwards until the floor with a wham, and looked up at the grinning figure of Filius Flitwick, who was holding Harry’s wand in his outstretched hand. 

“I do so enjoy your visits, Mr. Potter,” Flitwick said, somewhat wistfully, stretching out his hand to him to help Harry up. “Who doesn’t like a friendly duel every now and then?”

Harry took his hand and slowly made his way up to standing. 

“Don’t encourage him,” McGonagall sighed, but Flitwick only laughed. 

“As if I could make him any more determined,” he pointed out. “Should we be expecting more of these visits, now that your youngest is here, Mr. Potter? Not to mention, I hear you are recently retired as an Auror?”

McGonagall seemed to be frowning at this news.

“New travels fast,” Harry said drily. “But yes, it’s true. I’ve decided it’s time to find something else to do with my time.”

Flitwick raised his eyebrows. 

“Considering teaching?” he asked. 

Harry politely ignored that McGonagall was looking horrified at the suggestion. 

“No, not really,” he chuckled, “My kids would kill me for being too overprotective if the Headmistress didn’t get to me first.”

“They’d never find the body,’ McGonagall said sweetly, “If you so much as considered it.”

Flitwick laughed, falling into step beside them.

“Come now, Minerva,” Flitwick objected, “Surely you can admit that Mr. Potter has done much to increase the security and the wellbeing of this school.” 

McGonagall nodded in spite of herself. 

“Yes well,” she said grudgingly, “I do appreciate no longer being vastly understaffed.”

They were moving towards the Gryffindor entrance. 

“Don’t you have classes to teach, Filius?” she asked pointedly. 

Flitwick snickered, and Harry realized that somewhere over the years Flitwick had began to treat him like an equal, and let more of his true personality shine through and not just the professional.

“Thanks to our increased staffing levels we were just mentioning, I save Fridays for research, writing, and tutoring my most promising students,” he said mildly. “But I’ll take the hint and leave you both here.” 

He rose his hand to Harry’s level, and the two shook hands warmly. 

“Good to see you again, Mr. Potter,” he said, and added, with a twinkle in his eye, “I’d tell you to drop by any time but you seem to get up to that on your own without my encouragement.” 

Harry grinned in acknowledgement, said his goodbyes, and Filius turned back around to go to his quarters. 

McGonagall raised her eyebrows at Harry. 

“Does it pass your critique, or do you wish to try the Gryffindor entrance as well?” 

Harry shrugged. 

All the doors around were still shining gold, and Harry knew that none of the students would be able to get in or out without the Headmistress lifting the drill.

“I have a couple more suggestions for improvements to the protocols, but I’m satisfied for today,” he answered. 

“I’m sure you do,” McGonagall sighed, and tapped her wand to her throat again. 

“This is the Headmistress. The drill is clear. All students and staff may resume their normal activities.” 

The doors released their golden glow, and Harry was satisfied to see that the portraits were all following them to ensure that McGonagall was not being coerced into giving the all-clear. 

McGonagall tapped her throat again, looking as Harry took out a folded parchment from his pocket and inspected it. 

“Looks like James and Lilly are both waiting in the Gryffindor common room. But Albus seems to be dawdling in his rooms,” he said. 

“I don’t think this is exactly what the creators of that map had in mind when they made it,” McGonagall commented. 

Harry frowned. 

“This map is entirely dangerous in the wrong hands,” he said. “It’s really not safe at all for children to have. We all grow up, Headmistress, and I have no intention of my children ever getting into the same kind of trouble I did in the halls of this school.”

“Harry,” McGonagall said, reaching out to grasp his arm gently, “I understand that, I really do. And I’m grateful for how much you care about the children of this school. But don’t you think all this is getting to be a bit… much?”

Harry frowned at her. 

“Three headed dog,” he said, counting on his fingers, “detention in the forest when something was _injuring unicorns_ , escaped troll, lock that even a first year could pick…” he raised his eyebrows. “Do I really need to go on to the things that happened after first term of my very first year?”

McGonagall sighed, rubbing her eyes. 

“No, Mr. Potter,” she said shortly, “You do not. And for what it’s worth… I am sorry I wasn’t a better caregiver to you.”

Harry sighed, and it was his turn to try and be reassuring. 

“It’s all right,” he said gently. “I know you didn’t have nearly enough support for all those kids under your care. I promise you, if it’s the last thing I do, I’ll make sure you, or any other teacher at Hogwarts, are never in that position again.”


	7. The Comforts of Home

Harry got the Fat Lady to let Hugo, James, and Lily know he was waiting for them outside the Gryffindor common room, and once he had shrank the children’s bags and put them safely in his pocket, and Lily had run back three different times to get three different books for her homework, they were ready to make their way down to the lower levels to pick up Albus and Rose. 

They stopped by the Hufflepuff dormitories first. 

They had all thought that little, clever, wild-haired Rose was a shoe-in for Ravenclaw, or a Gryffindor at second thought of her love of the wilds, but she had got Hufflepuff, and been proud of it. 

“The hat made me a Hufflepuff because I’m gonna be as fierce and loyal as my Mom,” she wrote in a letter home, “And never let anyone tell me that we aren’t all equally deserving.” 

That take on things had dispelled some of Harry’s long-held prejudices, and of course, Hermione had grinned with pride when she read that part of the letter to Harry. 

The cousins chatted animatedly with each other about their week, their homework, and what they thought Hermione’s upcoming ceremony would be like as they made their way towards the Slytherin dungeons. 

Albus was waiting for him, standing next to the thin, tall figure of Scorpius Malfoy. 

Harry eyed the two of them warily, but Albus just gave his friend a cheerful hug goodbye, and then ran to catch up with his siblings and cousins. 

Harry shook his head, marvelling again at how different his twin boys were from each other as Albus waxed on about potions and his studies, and James laughed about Quidditch and the hippogriff he was caring for every night with the teacher who had taken Hagrid’s old position.

They wandered the long path out the school gates in a flurry of excited chatter, as Harry tried to catch up on the week’s happenings from all the children. 

Unless he had been on duty, he had yet to miss a weekend yet with the kids. 

Because he had pulled them out a bit early on Friday, they weren’t yet a part of the flurry of other parents waiting at the Floo portal that had been set up outside the grounds. 

The in portal and the out portal were guarded by two different set of bored-looking new graduates, and Harry considered setting off some fireworks just to test their skills, but wisely decided against it when he considered the havoc he might inadvertently cause. 

After all, he wasn’t the only overly-concerned parent who had lived through the Battle of Hogwarts. 

Instead, he waved blandly at the guards and decided he’d test their defenses in a more appropriate way another time, when he didn’t have five excited children weaving circles around him.

They flooed back to Harry’s place one at a time, with Harry pulling up the rear. 

The kids ran to get their cousins settled into their bedrooms and to set up an impromptu Quidditch game in the backyard while Harry puttered around the kitchen, making supper. 

After he and Ginny had gotten married, he had discovered to his surprise, that he found cooking by hand and not by magic was a stress-relieving habit for him.

He wondered if it had something to do with knowing that he’d never go hungry again, and that all his friends and guests and family would always have healthy, happy meals. 

Cooking supper with the radio playing cheery pop music was, as Ginny called it, his happy place. 

He let the kids play until it was well past dark, and then finally called them in for a wild supper of five children all talking over one another.

When the kids had all settled down into a contented post-supper haze, he Floo called Hermione so her kids could talk with her before he sent them all off to bed at a reasonable hour. 

“Mum, why isn’t Dad gonna be there?” Rose was the first to pout. “He promised us last weekend when he couldn’t make it, that we’d see him tomorrow instead!”

“He wanted to see you Rose,” Hermione responded, and Harry thought she looked distressed behind Rose’s frizzy curls. “He really did, but the investigation heated up unexpectedly, and he didn’t want to leave at a bad time.”

“That’s a stupid excuse,” Rose protested angrily, “And you can tell him I said so.” She stormed away from the fire and went off towards Lilly’s room. 

Lilly looked up from the book she’d been reading about The Mythical Beasts of the Amazon and went to follow Rose. 

Harry got closer to the fire. 

“Don’t worry, Hermione,” he said, as Hugo still sat before the fire, looking confused, “I’ll check in on her in a couple of minutes. Better to let her cool down, first.”

Hermione nodded in grateful agreement, and went back to her conversation with Hugo. 

Eventually, the two of them seemed like they were done chatting, and the boys wandered off to their rooms, Hugo gravitating towards James, as he always had. 

Harry pulled his chair closer to the fire and looked frankly at Hermione. 

“Mione,” he said. 

“Harry,” she answered. 

“I know the Department well enough to know that Ron could have gotten tomorrow off, unless he was in the middle of a covert operation gone really bad. This was a shit move on Ron’s part,” he said bluntly. 

He was surprised by how quickly the tears welled up in Hermione’s eyes. He had thought she would protest. 

“I know,” she said tensely, wiping furiously at her eyes. 

“I’ll give him hell for you,” he promised. “He’s my best friend, and my brother in law, but God, he can be thick when it comes to why things are emotionally significant some times.”

Hermione laughed weakly. 

“That’s my husband,” she agreed. 

“Do you want to stay the night here?” he asked her, “You know you’re always welcome.” It was important to Harry, that his friends always know that he had a room for them. It was why he and Ginny had such a ridiculously large house. He strongly believed people should know they were always welcome, and Ginny had an expansive Weasley’s sense of hospitality. Her brothers and their kids often spent weekends at their place, bought soon as he and Ginny had been married. 

“The only reason why I asked you to watch the kids tonight and tomorrow was that I wanted to have time to get caught up with Ron,” Hermione admitted, and then laughed. “The kids are gonna give me a hard time for not coming earlier.”

“I would have invited you when they were still awake, but I didn’t want to put you in a position where you felt you had to say yes to them if you’d rather have the night to yourself.”

Hermione considered it. 

“This house feels way too empty without any of the kids, and with Ron gone,” she said after a moment. 

“Merlin, do I ever know what you mean,” Harry agreed fervently.

That seemed to settle it for Hermione. She nodded decisively.

“Right, then. I’ll get my things packed and come join you in a minute.”

They broke off their call and Harry got out some of his best wine from the cupboard, pouring himself and Hermioine two glasses and setting them on a table in front of the fire, and then crept towards Lilly’s room, where she and Rose had set up for the night. 

He pressed his ear to the door, and when he didn’t hear anything, quietly opened it. 

Both girls were snuggled deep into the bed, snoring lightly. 

He smiled, and went back towards the common room.

The flames crackled green, and Hermione stepped through a few minutes later. 

Harry gestured with a grin towards the wine he’d set out for them, and they sat and chatted together late into the night, until the fire was a bed of coals and the bottle of wine was almost empty


	8. Reunion

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Note that the Fred who is referenced is what George named his son; in memory of his brother. I've kept to canon that Fred died in the Battle of Hogwarts.

Hermione had thought the ceremony would be very small and informal, given that she was the only witch receiving a doctorate that year. The wizarding world was small, with only 12000 registered adults citizens in the U.K., and with few scholars, so the size of the crowd took her by surprise as she sat nervously on the podium overlooking the assembly halls the Ministry set aside for public occassions such as this. 

Tiberius had warned her that the Minister of Magic would be there, but Hermione had thought that would be as a mere handshake at the end of the ceremony. 

She hadn’t expected Minister Paramita Patel to give a brief speech to open the ceremony, or for so many school children to attend; she guessed it must have been someone’s idea of a brilliant field trip to take children too young even for Hogwarts to listen to dense speeches about civil rights, but Hermione rather enjoyed their whispers and giggles interspersing the formality. It kept it from being too stiffly removed from the real world for her taste.

And as quickly as it had began, it was over, and after the flashbulbs from the press and Albus’s entirely too large magical camera had dimmed from her eyes, and she had managed to say some words which she hoped sounded both politically sage and more composed than she felt to the press who had gathered to watch her shake hands and bow as Tiberius laid her ceremonial sash over her head, she was finally able to hug her children, her niece and nephews, Molly and Arthur, and feel the greatest pride of all in the tears in her Mom’s eyes. 

Somehow they managed to get away from the crowds of the Ministry headquarters and back to Harry’s for a late tea. Luckily for Hermione, Harry was always good at managing impromptu feasts; when Ron had decided not to come back from Jamaica, he had offered to host everyone at his place instead for a tea. 

“Brilliant, as usual, Harry,” she grinned at him, drinking a glass of champagne that he had toasted her with, and leaning into him, surveying the table full of biscuits, jam tarts, fruit, cheeses, crackers, tiny hors d’oeuvres neatly wrapped in pastry, all overflowing in front of them. “Have you ever considered an alternative career as a chef?”

Harry laughed and leaned back into her.

“Well I am going to have to find something to do other than bothering McGonagall,” he admitted, surveying the chaos that the five cousins always managed to create. The older children kept making streamers and confetti fly around the room, accompanied with bursts of multi-coloured sparks from their wands. James had enchanted a sparkler to follow Rose around the room, and every time she spun around to attempt to fling it back towards him, he would make it dance an elaborate evasive pattern over her head, only to have it casually drift behind her once she had given up on wrenching it out of his control.

Hermione laughed, and let the older generation worry about the kids. Molly was reigning over her grandchildren with her usual maternal fierceness, floating James’s glass over and scolding him for trying to sneak in more champagne than the half glass Hermione had approved of, and banishing any whizzing sparks that got too close to the furniture. Her own mother sat like a reigning dignitary in the corner, beside Luna, who Harry had invited when he ran into her recently. Her mother was always completely unflappable, and managed her grandchildren with quite a bit much less shouting and a lot more raised eyebrows than Molly did. 

Hermione could only wish she had the knack. 

Eventually all the food had been eaten, the children’s wands had long since been confiscated after one too many close calls with accidentally incinerating Harry’s furniture, and Molly began to look tired. 

“We had best get going,” Arthur said to them both quietly, coming to shake Hermione’s hand again. “Molly and I aren’t as young as we used to be.”

She and Harry both looked at where Molly had sat into a couch next to Hermione’s mother, sipping tea and trying to hide the slope of her shoulders. 

“Of course,” Hermione agreed immediately, and gripped her arm on Arthur’s shoulder. “I’ll visit sometime this week when it’s less crazy, just me, and get a real update,” she added lowly, studying his face. 

He blinked several times, and Hermione could feel the tension in his shoulders. 

“You know how much I appreciate that Hermione,” he agreed. 

Molly had a bad case of dragon pox that fall which had developed into a lung infection.

She had all but refused to go to St. Mungo’s until Arthur had dragged her there, and she had been kept for a week in the hospital. She was on the mend now,but Hermione had noticed that she just wasn’t as quick to get up out of her seat to scowl after James or Hugo’s antics as she had been before the illness. 

With the Weasleys leaving, Hermione’s mother also moved to make a dignified exit, hugging Hermione again with tearful eyes and gratefully accepting Harry’s offer to bring her by side-along back to her East London flat. 

“You worry about your own children, dear,” her mother assured her, squeezing her arm. “Your young friend here is more than capable of looking after your old mama. And this party is for you, after all.”

“Thanks for being here, Mum,” Hermione smiled, tears gleaming in her eyes. “I know it was last minute and I just appreciate it all so much.”

“Of course, dear,” her Mom said, and looked at her with that piercing look that always saw more than what Hermione expected. “I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Her Mom knew better than to say anything about Ron’s obvious absence, but he stood out in what she didn’t say. 

Hermione sat down next to Luna and tried to get caught up on her adventures as the younger kids chased loops around each other in the house and the older ones all slinked away into James’s room. 

“Do I even want to know?” she asked Luna with a sigh as she heard snickers emanating from his bedroom. 

“Probably safer not to,” Luna agreed with a grin. “Then you don’t have to do anything about it.”

A minute later, Albus, James and Rose all ran breathless back to Hermione. 

“Mom, can we go to to Weasley’s Wizarding Wheezes tonight?” Rose asked, all sweetness and innocence. “We haven’t seen Uncle George in so long, and Aunt Angelina says he’s going to be there tonight, and that she can bring Fred and Roxanne if you agree?”

Hermione was surprised to find that she felt a wave of restless energy sitting in Harry’s house without Ginny and Ron there with them both. 

She raised her eyebrows at Luna, who nodded to the plan.

“I’ve been meaning to talk with George for a while,” she agreed.

“Luna and I are in, so long as Harry agrees,” Hermione decided, just as she heard the front door opening. 

The children beelined to Harry, repeating their question, and Luna snapped her fingers and her wheelchair appeared beside her. She set down into it heavily.

“It’s been a long day,” she explained at Hermione’s concerned look. “But I haven’t spoken with George and the kids in forever.”

“The kids tell me you’re up for it, Hermione, Luna, is this true?” Harry popped his head into the room and by now Lilly and Hugo had stopped chasing each other long enough to join in the pleading. 

“It’s true,” Hermione agreed, and piled into the already crowded hallway, “Put on your boots, kids, it’s looking like rain outside, and we need to get some more owl treats from Eeylopp’s after you’ve tired yourself out at Weasley’s”

Harry visited George often enough on foundation business that he had his Floo connected to the back office at the joke shop, and Harry took the children through the fireplace while Hermione Apparated with Luna to an alleyway by the shop so that she didn’t have to worry about her wheelchair getting stuck in the Floo. 

Hermioine thought maybe she’d have to go ahead to ask George to clear some wards so Luna could Apparate right into the back office, but Luna tapped her chair three times with her wand when she got to the stairs that lead them above the joke shop and towards the offices, and her chair floated gracefully over the steps in time with Hermione. 

“Wow, Luna,” Hermione said appreciatively, “You must have really been working on that.”

Luna shrugged modestly, but Hermione had heard Ron and Harry and Ginny waxing on at length about the nuances of different brooms to realize how hard self-flying charms were to master.

George was standing waiting for them at the second floor lobby, grinning. 

“Luna!” he said appreciatively, as she settled down on the floor next to him. “Did I just hear Hermione say you modified your wheelchair yourself?”

“Flying wheelchairs are not exactly a booming business,” Luna answered with a grin, “And I do use it quite a lot.”

George leaned over to give her a cheerful hug, and waved the adults into the back office. 

“I told the kids to meet us back here in an hour,” Harry explained to Luna and Hermione. “They’re already running around downstairs.” 

They moved in through the doors to the workspace above the store, past the large staff room with several witches sorting through boxes and checking long inventory lists, tapping their wand against a paper as a blinking banner across the top of the desk updated with supply orders. Other employees ducked in and out amongst the stacks of boxes, and the faint smell of rosemary and mandrake root wafted out from a heavily warded door they walked past.

They made their way into George’s private office at the back; it was cramped with floor-to-ceiling shelving and potion ingredients and prototypes neatly labelled; his desk was a mess of paperwork. Diagrams and pie charts were plastered all over the walls, but there was a cheerful fire along the back wall and several overstuffed chairs clustered in a semi circle around it where he gestured for them to sit. 

“Luna,” George said appreciatively, studying her chair, “If you ever want a career that isn’t travelling the world and discovering new species, I’d hire you here any day as an inventor. Your mind works in most uncanny ways.”

Luna grinned at the compliment. 

“Don’t think I’m ready to settle down yet,” she said, “But I was wondering if you could help me with something that’s been bugging me.”

“What do you need,” George asked, his eyes lighting with curiousity and leaning in to her. “What strange mythical animal are you proving the existence of to the rest of us unbelievers this time?”

Luna sighed. 

“It’s nothing so fun as the heat-detecting mists you made me last time, I’m afraid,” she replied. “Although those did wonders for helping me to hunt invisible nargles, let me tell you.”

She gestured to her leg. 

“Do you mind?” she asked George. 

“Not at all,” he murmured, and she pushed away her formal robes, tapped her wand against the trousers she had on underneath, which tore in a clean line above her knee on the prosthetic side. 

She shifted awkwardly in her chair until she had the prosthetic off, and then frowned in concentration, gesturing with her wand and holding the prosthetic in her other hand until a duplicate of the prosthetic slowly materialised in front of her. 

She slipped her wand away into her wrist guard and held both the prosthetics in her hands, studying them closely, and prodding the duplicate several times with her wand or rubbing it between her fingers to test the texture of the socket. Once she seemed satisfied they were an exact match, she passed the duplicate to George. 

“Wow, Luna,” Harry said, breaking the awed silence. “You really are getting to be a master of wordless magic.”

“I have to be,” Luna agreed, but without conceit. “A lot of the animals I study are really shy and I don’t want to spook them.”

She was struggling back into her prosthetic, and reached a hand out to Hermione to help her stand, so she could adjust the seal on her thigh. 

George was murmuring diagnostic spells over the prosthetic. 

“Luna,” he asked in a surprised tone, “Is this completely magic-free?”

“It is indeed,” Luna said, bouncing several times and then, satisfied, letting go of Hermione’s arm so she could sit back down unaided. 

“And hence my coming to you. I was hoping you could help me with it.”

“I’m flattered,” George answered slowly, “But I’m not a Healer. Wouldn’t they be better at this sort of thing than I am?”

“If they were, I wouldn’t have come to you,” Luna answered. “There’s just not enough amputees in the wizarding world for it to be something anyone has ever bothered to put any work into. And you’re a genius when it comes to making inanimate objects do what you want them to.”

George was turning it over in his hands curiously. 

“You’ve got my curiousity piqued,” he admitted. “What do you want to change?”

“I want to be able to sense with my prosthetic,” Luna answered immediately, “But only when I’m wearing it. It doesn’t have to be as sensory rich as a real leg, but I want to be able to know if something I’m stepping in is going to support me, or if it’s too slippery, or too hot, and I want more instant feedback on what objects are in my way; like skin would do.”

George whistled slowly, nodding. 

“Anything else?” he asked. 

“I want the socket to automatically adjust to my leg size. I want the socket to be self-cleaning, and to wick away sweat, dirt, or other irritants.”

George grinned. 

“You know Luna, I do appreciate a challenge,” he answered. “And who knows, maybe there are some non-medical applications to every single thing you’ve just said.”

“If you can do everything Luna just said, there are probably a fair number of medical applications as well,” Hermione murmured. 

“I’ll see what I can do, Luna, but I make no promises,” George said cautiously. “But it’ll be a fun hobby for me to play with after hours.”

Luna nodded in satisfaction, but Harry was studying him in bemusement.

“Merlin, George, don’t let Hermione convince me to give you a foundation grant for this!” Harry said. “Since you are the director of finances and operations, people might see it as a conflict of interest.”

George set the limb aside, and perked up at the mention of the foundation. 

He looked around at them. 

“You know, I think we finally have all of the founding members of the foundation in one place,” he said with a grin, “I think this calls for a toast!”

He waved his wand, and a bottle of cognac floated out from his desk drawer, along with four glasses. 

Luna was smiling. 

“Not that I’m one to shy away from praise, but I don’t think I can call myself a founding member,” she said, as George poured them all a shot. “Half shot for me, George,” she added, “I’ve already had a bit of champagne at Hermione’s, and I’ll have to Apparate back to Harry’s for the night; the chair doesn’t fit in the Floo.”

George obligingly poured one of the glasses well short of a shot. 

“Of course you’re a founding member, Luna,” George said, passing out the shots. 

“If it weren’t for Harry funding your first play, and me realizing you had plenty more talent the world deserves to see, I never would have suggested Harry needed to actually put together a way of making some money from the arts. And now that we’ve made a pile of money thanks to my remarkable marketing skills, we can venture into other areas and open a whole new baby foundation to start with science grants.”

He held up his glass and nodded at them one by one:

“Here we have the spirit of the foundation who first proved we could actually do this,” he nodded to Luna,

“the visionary to imagine what could be, and the brains to do all the nasty paperwork to make it possible,” he nodded to Hermione, 

“the courage to stick it to the man whilst being crazy enough to trust me with his cash,” he nodded to Harry, 

“and the marketing and business savvy to actually pull this off”, he said, gesturing to himself. 

“To us!” he cheered, and they toasted. 

They gulped the cognac down quickly, and Hermione felt her face begin to flush from the alcohol. 

“Wow George,” she laughed, “You don’t go cheap on your friends!”

“No water added to that,” he laughed in agreement. “That desk is heavily warded against Fred and Roxanne.”

“Now let’s hear the gossip,” George grinned at Hermione and leaned into her conspiratorily. “Are we going to be giving all our foundation’s hard earned money to one Severus Snape, former arch rival, on our very first medical grant?”

Hermione laughed. 

“Can’t wait ‘til tomorrow to find out?” she teased him. She was supposed to make her recommendation to the full board then. 

“Never was any good at waiting,” he agreed. 

“Well, I’m going to recommend it, yes,” she admitted, swirling the rest of her cognac in her glass, “But the board still has to approve it.”

“Nonsense, Hermione, we all know he’s the best candidate,” George answered, sitting back in satisfaction. “We really just needed your stamp of approval so Harry here didn’t have a conniption fit.”

Harry rolled his eyes, setting his glass down on the desk. 

“I’d hardly have of conniption fit, George,” he replied. “I’m not 15 anymore. He’s not my least favourite professor/spy any more”

“And thank God for that!” George agreed heartily. “Cheers!”

George and Harry drank more cognac than they probably should, and they switched back to congratulating Hermione again for her accomplishments, until she was laughing with embarasment and throwing candy wrappers at them.

At last, Harry stood up and stretched laxly. 

“Wonder what the kids are up to,” he said, “It’s probably been at least an hour by now, don’t you think?”

They managed to pry themselves away from the fire and then had even more difficulty to pry their children away from the store and from Fred and Roxanne’s excited chatter. They waved George off with cheerful promises to visit again, and totally eschewed Eeylop’s when Hermione realized with a yelp how late it was. They Flooed back home to Harry’s with a contented warmth that had more to do with just the cognac George had served them.


	9. Recognition

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editted 01/28, but I'm also gonna have to go back and correct where I had previously written juris doctorate. I didn't realize that was the degree to practice law. Hermione would have gotten that as soon as she possibly could have in the years after the Battle of Hogwarts. She's being awarded a higher distinction here for her exceptional contributions to the legal field, the doctorate of law.

Severus Snape woke up to a blinking green light on the enchanted parchment that he shared with Hermione. 

He turned on his bedside lamp and walked over to his dresser to check the message. 

_Congratulations_ , he read in her careful script, _The Board of Directors has approved your application for the grant this morning. It was unanimous. George Weasley will be sending you the official documents by owl, and they should arrive sometime by Monday evening or Tuesday morning your time, but I wanted to let you know the good news immediately. The board has appointed me as the liaison for the project, so please let me know any questions you have after looking over the documents._

Well, his first question would be whether or not any of them could be talked into communicating by email, infinitely faster than the inefficient system of letter carriers portkeying to owl distribution centres, but he wouldn’t push the issue for now. 

_Thank you sincerely for your prompt notification,_ he wrote thoughtfully. _I eagerly await the documents. Dr. Pomfrey and I will be in touch as soon as we have time to thoroughly review them._

He paused to consider the tone carefully, and then added:

 _I am sincerely delighted you have all put your trust in us for this exciting venture._

Satisfied that it met the right balance of professionalism and warmth, he tapped his wand against the paper and sent his response off.

He groomed himself quickly, ate a light breakfast, and then grabbed his bag to walk to the gym so that he’d have time to ponder how this news would change his life. 

Severus had discovered over the years that his sobriety thrived on small habits, and wavered under the pressure of big changes. 

And so he concentrated on the feeling of his feet on the ground, the sensation of the cold winter air against his cheeks, the particular way that the streetlights made the still dark snow sparkle as he walked. 

He had carved these small routines into his days, in the midst of the chaos of studying first an undergraduate, then a masters degree in biochemistry, scraping by on his small T.A. salary and the cash Ali used to allot him from his and Helena’s inventions all while studying his Potions innovations with her during the summers and the afternoons when he didn’t have to be in classes.

He had completed his schooling thanks to the Muggle system of acknowledging disabilities; of this he had no doubt. His course load had been 60% that of a non-disabled student, and he had shamelessly asked for extensions whenever he needed them. It had taken him 8 years to complete his undergraduate degree, and three years to complete his masters. 

Of course, he had relapsed frequently throughout his undergraduate, but he had learned something from it; not to overlook the small habits that built his peace of mind. 

And so he walked in the heavy falling snow, and thought about what would have to change now, and what he could not afford to give up. 

He would finish out his semester of coursework for his PhD, but quit T.A.ing immediately. Helena had told him in advance that she would understand, and had already been scouting out replacements for him. 

He would immediately stop all his mail-order brewing, other than the orders that he had already began. He would need Mx. Pierre and Ms. Berland for his research on the Wolfsbane potion, and he wouldn’t ask them to push themselves in ways that he was unwilling to do; but he would give them first right to reject any of the potions orders he had accepted but not yet begun. If they felt it was too much to take on while also researching, he would write a carefully worded owl to the witch or wizard who he had agreed to help, and politely decline to complete the order, refunding them their money and giving them another suggestion of someone else trustworthy to complete the work in his stead. 

He arrived at the gym, hung his heavy coat by the door, took off his boots, and moved towards the dojo at the rear. 

He found the rhythms of practicing karate soothing; the discipline and the order of bowing in to the teacher, lining up by belt rank, and the ritualistic bows and sayings. 

He had practiced in this dojo for the past four years, coming every Monday and Thursday at 6 in the morning to ground himself in the fluid movements of the katas, unchanged over generations of being passed down from teacher to student. 

He let his mental tension release into the effort of precisely emulated movements, into the feeling of his heart beating in his chest and the sweat beginning to tickle at his brow, the power of his kicks and punches snapping into the air without any consequences for himself or the classmates he had come to know so well over the years. 

There was no time to worry about anything next to the immediacy of a fist stopping three inches in front of his face; and although he would never be one to enjoy competitions like some of his classmates, he did enjoy sparring when he trusted his classmates were skilled and careful enough to avoid any contact. 

After he had broken up with Ali, he had complained to Helena that he lacked any form of physical touch in his life. The importance of touch was a reality that he had woken up to after the war, when he had first began to cast off the emotional and somatic deadness that he had been forced to take on all those long years as a spy. He then found the lack of loving touch in his life was as deep an absence and as sharp a pain as if he had been wandering in a desert without water for years. Helena had nodded in understanding as he complained to her about the near physical pain that touch deprivation caused him without a romantic partner, and encouraged him to find other ways to meet that need.

When he told her he started karate, she had laughed at him. 

“A fist in the face is not exactly what I meant,” she answered. 

He grumbled, but saw her point. He asked a couple of the Nisga’a wizards for advice, but they didn’t think him strange for it as someone in the West might. They recommended he go for regular massages with their apprentices. Luckily, he did not have to pay them exorbitantly given that they were still learning. 

They used no wands, but guided their magic directly through his skin as they touched him. 

Severus was unsurprised when they told him they found decades of trauma interacting with both his nervous system, his muscles, and the magical pathways that twined throughout his body. 

The Cruciatus curse was one hell of a weapon, and Voldemort had used it all too frequently. 

The massages released aches that the Healers at St Mungo’s had told him would always be with him. 

Karate on Monday and Thursday mornings, A.A. on Wednesday evenings, bowling on Friday evenings, and he cooked his apprentices suppers every Tuesday evening. Massages when he needed, and luncheons he hosted at his tiny flat to celebrate his students’ accomplishments. These were the routines that kept him feeling like maybe he wouldn’t fall back into the broken shell of a man he had been, that kept the spectre of addiction at bay. 

By the time he and the other students had bowed out of their class, exchanging greetings and smiles, the light still hadn’t yet risen in the sky. 

He showered and dressed at the gym, making his way directly to the office, again walking though the snow, again noticing the colours of the crystals of snow twinkling at him. Relax your shoulders. Don’t hunch against the cold. Notice the warmth of your hands inside your gloves and the softness of the rabbit fur. A whisper to guide him to stay in the moment, to ground himself in the present.

He wanted to tell Helena the good news in person, but when he walked in the door he knew by the wide grin on her face that she already knew. 

She threw her arms around him in exuberant greeting. 

“We did it, my old friend!” she said to him, “Congratulations. I know what this means to you.”

He smiled, and they walked towards their lounge together in tandem. 

He tapped his wand against the bricks to open the for her, and started the fire while she rummaged through the cupboards to find coffee ingredients. Their movements were the routine of a well tread path, predictable and steady around one another, as she passed him the coffee to pour into the French press.

She sat next to him on the couch and leaned playfully into his shoulders as they sipped their coffee. 

“Exceptional brewing, Severus, as ever,” she teased him. 

It had taken years until he was able to relax into her touch without tensing from fear, or from worry that either of them would mistake each others intentions for something that it wasn’t. 

“Always the best for you, my dear Helena,” he grinned, and let her weight settle into him. 

She leaned his head affectionately on his shoulder. 

“And just like that,” she said wistfully, “You’ll be more involved in the wizarding world again.”

Severus considered the truth of the statement as he sipped his coffee. 

“It’s inevitable,” he admitted, “to a certain extent. I imagine I’ll have to make myself presentable for a number of articles and interviews, if nothing else, to promote the interests of the foundation. But I’ve been quite clear with Madam Granger that my life is here. And as much as I’ll miss teaching the U.N.B.C. students, I’ve still got all my friends and acquaintances here. So don’t worry, my dear Helena, I’m hardly abandoning you alone in the Muggle world yet. I’ll still be here.”

She snorted a laugh at him. 

“As if you could ever leave us,” she answered, and sat up. 

“Although,speaking of interviews and articles, you may be interested to know it’s not Madam Granger any more.”

She grabbed a magazine from the coffee table and passed it to him. 

He had been surprised when he first found her reading a Witches Weekly years ago, but it seemed with the end of the war, his Slytherins had recognized the opportunity to expand their once insular family businesses. He had been pleased to note that Pansy Parkison had taken over the editorship of the Witches Weekly and immediately expanded its scope to an international women’s magazine featuring snippets on witches accomplishments all over the English speaking world. It was good to see one of his former charges had managed to accomplish something worthwhile with her ambition. 

Helena paged through the magazine until she found the page she was looking for and pointed it towards him. 

It was a full page exclusive on Hermione Granger, with a photo of her in her dress robes as she shook the hand of the Minister of Magic, Paramita Patel, and received her diploma for her legum doctorate. It outlined her accomplishments, and included, he was pleased to see, a rather heartfelt quote about the importance her Muggle mother had on her understanding of civil rights. He doubted many in magical U.K., insular as it had been for so many years, would fully appreciate the gravity of her words as she described how her mother grew up Black in Alabama and married a White Irish Catholic only 3 years after interracial marriage was even legal in that State. He pondered about how that family history might have impacted her choice to stay and fight for her rights in the wizarding world rather than retreat back to the Muggle one her parents lived in as he sipped his coffee. A mixed race woman whose mother had known prejudice and whose father had fled violence in one world; a so-called Mudblood in the magical world; it seemed Hermione Granger would have had to stand her ground to claim what should have been freely granted her no matter where she went. 

He smiled at the informative but positive tone of the article; Pansy Parkinson had done an excellent job of elevating the Witches Weekly from a gossip rag to a genuinely interesting source of news and human interest. 

“I can’t believe we get the luck to have her as our liaison,” Severus said to Helena. “I honestly don’t know if I would have the mental flexibility to cope with a responsible George Weasley.”

Helena guffawed. 

“Even I don’t think I would have handled that well, and I haven’t even met the man.”

Telling her stories about the twins’ exploits had been some of the only lighter moments he had to share with her about his time as a teacher in the years leading up to Voldemort’s ressurection. 

Severus got up from the couch and went through the cupboards on a sudden inspiration. 

“We have a couple of extra silving stirring rods, right Helena?” he asked her, grabbing an old dented one.

“Mmmhmmm,” she agreed absently. “Thank God your former students are sensible enough to know what a good gift those types of things make for a Potions teacher.”

“I always have had some exceptionally practical apprentices,” he complimented her, “now can I have at your magazine?”

“All yours,” she gestured lazily towards it, and he floated it over, carefully tearing out the page with a clean swish of his wand, and then held it next to the stirring rod to ensure he got the measurements correct. 

“Perfect,” he murmured, and began a delicate transfiguration to change the rod into a frame of intertwining spiderwort and wallflowers. 

Helena came wandering over to him to peer over his shoulder as he worked. 

He conjured a glass for frame and made sure the backing was soft to not scratch the walls with a flourish.

“Gorgeous, Sev,” Helena remarked, and went to wash their dishes at the sink. 

“I’ll send it by owl later today with a card wishing congratulations from both of us,” he assured her. 

Helena only shrugged. 

“She was your student,” she said, and looked at the flowers. “Spiderwort and wallflower?”

He nodded, satisfied he had the likeness so accurate she could see it. 

“Provide strength and mental fortitude; a general sense of esteem, and a stabilizing base for potions pertaining to mental faculties; i.e., you think very highly of her but your intentions are not romantic,” Helena interpreted. “Although who knows if she’ll get all that without being a Potions master herself.”

Severus shrugged. 

“The framed article and accompanying card should be explicit enough of that,” he said drily. 

He looked to Helena and saw she was chewing her lip. 

“Severus. Do you really think you’re going to be okay working so closely with someone that you knew from back then?”

“She’s not applying to be my apprentice, Helena,” he answered. “The most intense work is all going to be done here, with Ms. Berland and Mx. Pierre.”

But Helena had set her jaw. 

“Severus,” she said seriously. “You are going to be seeing Hermione regularly. And eventually, you’re going to run into Harry. You might even have to spend days at a time with them. How are you going to cope?”

He set a gentle hand on her shoulder. 

Helena hadn’t seen him at his worse-- that unfortunate distinction went to her mother-- but she had seen him when he was crashing through relapse after relapse while they roomed together doing their undergraduates.

“One day at a time, Helena,” he said to her gently. 

She sighed, recognizing the slogan, nodded, and left to prepare for the class she was teaching. 

He stared at the door as it closed behind her and realized he was relieved she had not pressed the issue further. 

He truly did not know what else he could have said.


	10. Remembering

After the war, Snape had, rather unimaginatively, followed in his father’s footsteps and became a roaring drunk. 

Oh, it had all started innocently enough. 

He was recovering under Poppy's care in the Hogwart's infirmary. Somehow, between Hermione, Ron, and Harry, someone had floated his unconscious body to the Great Hall and brought him to Poppy's attention. He didn't know exactly how it had happened, and he had never dared to ask any of them afterwards. He was unconscious the whole time. 

Poppy told him afterwards that the moment she had saw whose body was hiding under Hermione's cloak, she had spelled his face, and like the unfailingly diligent and equitable woman she was, did everything she possibly could to save his life. 

She didn't know he was a spy and innocent of the Dumbledore's murder when she did it. But she had always been fiercely protective of him, from the moment he had showed up all too often in her infirmary, hexed by classmates or with bruises from his father, and close mouthed about the causes for either. 

She had only ever sighed, wiped her eyes, and treated him for his injuries. She would not do any differently when he was on the edge of death. 

She kept him at Hogwarts as long as she dared, and then transferred him to a Muggle hospital.

He was in a coma there for two weeks, but what she didn't know was that he could still hear her as she sat next to him and clung on to his hand. 

"I never believed you betrayed us," she said, her voice low and fierce, "Never."

When he woke up out of the coma weeks later, he was paralyzed from the neck down. Something about the antidote he had been given, and Nagini's jaws; he didn't understand how, but the fact was he couldn't move anything but his lips. She fed him thickened water and told him that he had been hiding him until she could appear on his behalf at a hearing at the Wizengamot.

"Harry testified at your hearing," she told him. "I'm going to transfer you to St. Mungo's." 

It was 7 weeks after the Battle of Hogwarts by then.

By the time he left the Muggle hospital, he had developed a taste for the soothing numbness of strong narcotics. He never had trouble sleeping under the lulling blackness of opiate derivatives. 

His nightmares, his terror, his anger; they all sank into a dull black pool of drugged stupor.

The detox at St. Mungo's was terrible. 

"Severus!" Poppy had cried, as she came into his room late one evening, to find him shaking and sweating on the bed. "What's happened!" She rang the call bell for him and glared around the room. 

"Why hasn't someone checked in on you!"

"Apparently nobody told the idiots here that you cannot simply cut a man off morphine abruptly!" Severus growled. 

He was able to use his upper body now; his nerves had been regrown under the administrations of multiple complicated spells. At least now he could express his frustration with all the wrath of his newly recovered voice. 

"They didn't taper my dosages, and when I voiced my concerns, they merely gave me a lecture about the inferiority of Muggle medicine!"

"Those fools," Poppy hissed. "But surely they now see their error?"

Severus snorted. 

"They're too afraid to admit they should have listened to me before dosing me with potions. And now the morphine would interact with the potions in unknown ways. I'm stuck detoxing."

"Is there anything I can do?"

Snape hesitated. 

He hadn't asked anything about Hogwart's since he had become conscious, although he knew that Poppy spent her days there. 

"My office," he asked lowly, bracing himself for the worse. "Did anything last?"

"I don't know, Severus," Poppy sighed, looking tired. “The dungeons were not hard hit. But still, so much structural damage was done. It is possible that your quarters and your office were effected anyway. No one has been able to get in to check since you left last year. Your wards are too good.”

Snape didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry.

That Hogwarts could go through all of that, and still his wards should last? 

The irony was almost unbearable. 

“I have specialized potions in my private store,” he admitted. “It will help with pain and with soothing. I needed it sometimes, after—“

He cut himself off, but Poppy always understood. 

Her lips were pressed into a thin line. 

After his resurrection, Voldemort had lost any of the sanity he had ever had. During the first war, he had been clever enough to avoid torturing those loyal to him, if nothing else, out of the need to keep their esteem. 

Of course, he would not hesitate to kill or maim any traitors to the most brutal extent, but those served as warnings to those who would dare dream of escape. 

After his resurrection, Voldemort lost whatever compunctions had once kept him from torturing his own. 

Snape was being watched closely by Voldemort. The followers whispered that he had not done enough to aide Voldemort’s resurrection, questioned his inability to snatch Harry out from under Dumbledore’s nose and bring him to the Dark Lord. 

When Snape had failed to bring useful information about Dumbledore or especially when he said little about any of the children—he was reminded, in a brutal fashion, to do better. 

The point was not even necessarily to punish, but to humiliate. To remind his followers that even the most favoured would not be spared his wrath if they did not deliver. 

Voldemort had not truly trusted Snape until he killed Dumbledore. 

And by then, what good did any of his spying do, when he could scarcely bring any of that news to the order without being killed himself?

He hoped perhaps that he could be there at some critical moment, some time when he could throw himself meaningfully between the Dark Lord and Harry.... but it did not do to allow his thoughts to linger on these things for too long. 

“My cloak,” he said, and Poppy handed it to him. 

He fumbled in his pockets for a moment, nearly despairing, and then passed her a key. 

He waved his wand over it, and the key glowed a bright gold for a brief moment. 

“It will open to you and only you now. Do not bring any other into my quarters. It will not go well for them.”

She nodded tersely, and he told her where to find the potions. 

What he did not tell her was that he had always used them sparingly, because they were as addictive as they were effective. He told himself then that he didn’t want her to worry, that he knew how to manage himself. 

Looking back, he wondered if he had already began lying to himself back then. 

After a month at St. Mungo’s he was able to walk again. 

He was making less progress with the wreckage of his mind. 

“The Cruciatis curse,” the Mind Healer told him. The Healer seemed impossibly young; a short, nut brown man with a gentle expression always present in his dark eyes. He was small, and spoke with an accent Snape couldn’t quite place. He was the sort of man who easily inspired trust. 

“In my home country, we have known for a long time that it has more effect than what it first appears. It is only now, that so many are entering this hospital with severe spell damage from the curse, that the rest of the world is beginning to listen to us.”

Snape was a man who was used to hearing bad news. 

“Tell me what it is I have to worry about,” Snape replied. 

The Healer nodded. 

“To endure it as many times as you have and not succumbed to madness, it is because you have learned to burn away a part of yourself that was not in use. This does not mean it was not an important part, and I cannot tell you in advance what it is. But if we proceed with healing, you may notice that part of yourself begins to come alive again. I cannot tell you in advance what will happen. 

“For some, it is a welcome relief; memories of loved ones and a feeling of aliveness returns to them. But for others, it is dark memories they have forgotten, suppressed, erased to make room to hold the pain of the curse. Reversing that causes them to remember.”

“I have nothing to fear from memories,” Snape answered. “I have already survived the worst that has happened.”

“You wish to proceed, understanding the risks?”

“I do,” Snape agreed. 

The Healer nodded, and took his hand. 

He held his wand above Snape’s head, and at first, all Snape felt was a warm light flow through all his body. 

Snape felt as though he had been brought out into the light of a warm spring day after years hiding in a cold, dank, and cramped burrough. 

He sighed in deep pleasure. 

His arms. 

Had he ever really noticed that particular sensation of the feeling of the skin resting smoothly on the back of his arms?

The Mind Healer set his wand down and was speaking in a gentle tone of voice. 

“It seems you have chosen a common method of disassociating from pain. You have been unable to feel intensity of sensation in most of your body for the past number of years.”

Snape nodded, smiling gently in he afterglow of the magic. 

“Take it easy today,” the Mind Healer said. 

“Is that it?” Snape asked. 

The Healer only shook his head. 

“Oh, no,” he said. “There is much, much more damage to heal than just this. You had also cut yourself off from your emotions. We didn’t touch that today. This can only be done short bursts at a time while the mind adjusts”

Snape nodded unsurprised. 

“It makes sense,” he agreed absently. “I was a spy, and I had to keep an appearance of indifference, and even of hatred towards many. If I allowed myself to feel, I might have betrayed myself, or worse, someone else. And ended up dead.”

The Healer nodded. 

“You had good reasons to do what you did. But I must warn you, you may not like the return of your emotions. You might be surprised by the strength of their weight on you.”

Snape shrugged. 

“I can manage,” he answered. And back then, fool that he was, he even really meant it.

*** 

After three more treatments from the Healer, Snape started having panic attacks every night.

He couldn’t sleep. 

He had nightmares. 

But he also had the potions Poppy had brought him. 

They had a terrific fight when she found out he had gone through them all. 

“You had enough to last you a year!” Poppy yelled, her face red. “You terrible fool, you know how addictive they are!”

Snape glared at her. 

“It was my choice to make! Who should care if I numb myself from the terrible parts of this recovery?”

“I care, you fool! And what you’re doing is dangerous. I can’t handle losing… losing anyone else…” she cut off abruptly, sagging onto his bed in tears. 

He sat up. 

He was not a heartless monster, though he had played the part of one for many years. 

“Poppy,” he said, setting his hand hesitatingly on her shoulder. He really wasn’t any good at comforting others. He had no practice at it. And his Slytherin charges looked to him for guidance, but not comfort. 

“I won’t die on you. I’m not fool enough to poison myself with it.”

“But you are addicted!” Poppy protested. “And worse, I was the one who brought it to you!” Her shoulders were shaking with tears. 

“I--” he hesitated, and then committed himself. “I promise you I’ll stop taking them.”

At least that was one promise he managed to keep.

While he was getting the mind healing, he was learning to walk again, although he needed a cane. They told him he would be ready for discharge soon, 5 weeks after he came to St. Mungos, and 6 weeks after the Muggle hospital. 

“Are my quarters still available in the castle?” He asked Poppy one evening as she read a book beside his bedside. “I know I won’t be ready to teach yet, but maybe I can go back at least to part-time hours in the winter term.”

“Oh, Severus,” she said, biting her lip.

“What is it?”

“There is no way you are going to be able to teach until you are cleared of your charges.”

Snape felt as if a bucket of ice cold water had been thrown over his head. 

“I thought—“ he was stammering, his stomach a pit, “I thought you had represented me while I was in the hospital, and I was found innocent!”

Poppy was shaking her head, a horrified expression on her face. 

“That was only a first appearance,” she whispered, trying to reach out to him. But he flinched away from her touch, and she withdrew her hand. “You were released without bail based on Harry’s statement, but you still have to sit trial for Dumbledore’s death. They are lowering the charge from first degree murder to manslaughter.”

“I will be found guilty,” Snape whispered. “Poppy, I am guilty!”

“You are not,” Poppy hissed. “It was war, and you were following his own orders! It was a mercy to die quickly, rather than the torture that the curse would have done to him!”

“I am poor, and Marked, and a Half Blood with no family or connections,” Snape said coldly. “They will kill me for this.”

“They are outlawing death by Dementor. We are writing a new consitituion, that separates the judiciary from the politicians, of all times in the history of this nation, you have a better chance at trial now than ever before!”

Snape stared hollowly ahead.

“I will never return to Hogwarts again.” It had been his only home and only refuge for decades, when he hadn’t dared to make any friends or connections, lest the Death Eaters threaten them in order to control him. 

If the Death Eaters, not to mention Voldemort, would use any of his loved ones as leverage against him then he would give them no leverage. 

“Do not plan your own funeral yet!” Poppy persisted. “And anyway, you are coming to live with me.”

Snape shook his head firmly. 

“I couldn’t ask that of you. I’ll be returning to Cokeworth.”

He had inherited his father’s home, and kept the dirty, dingy place at least in working order. 

“You don’t have a choice,” Poppy replied drily. “I’m your guardian until your trial is over. It’s live with me or live in prison.”

He wasn’t enough of an ingrate to say he would spare her the trouble by going to prison, and so he readied himself to live with Poppy. 

***

He managed to stay sober long enough to brew Poppy the potions she needed for the Hogwarts students, and to teach Helena what she could do without magic. 

Helena had come back to live with her mother for the first time in years. Severus gathered that she had passed what they called high school with lying colours, but that was in the Muggle world, and she knew the wonders of the magical one. She was as much of a lost puppy in Poppy’s house as he was, and so he did what he knew best; he taught her to brew.

Her insights about the boiling points of various potions, the chemical interactions between ingredients were sharp and insightful, and he found it pleasing to experiment with which Potions could be brewed without a drop of magic, and which, even when they were only being stirred, required someone with a magical touch.

He was able to occupy himself like this for a while, but he drank himself into oblivion every weekend. Poppy frowned, but left him to his small darkened room and his darker thoughts. 

Eventually,the end of the school year approached, and with it he lost all sense of purpose. He and Helena had nothing more to brew. She was wavering over her next steps, but he simply shrugged and told her that obviously she was too brilliant to live a life of indignity in the magical world, and that she should apply for university for the fall. 

She pressed her lips together, studied him with unreadable eyes, and some months later, she showed him her acceptance letter. 

As his trial approached he allowed himself to get progressively drunker for progressively longer periods of time. 

He had nothing to do, no potions to brew; his only student would be leaving him in September, and so she should, she had a brighter life ahead of her in the Muggle world than anywhere else. And he had the loss of his freedom hanging over his head, the certainty that plagued him that he would be thrown into jail. 

The Death Eaters there would hate him for his betrayal; any common criminals would never believe him innocent, and he had no doubt that they would find a way to kill him. He would die in prison, for he didn’t have the courage to brew himself some undetectable poison that would take his life quickly. 

He was barely conscience for his trial, his mind weighed down by the twin demons of alcohol and a deep depression fuelled by hopelessness. 

He was vaguely aware that Hermione Granger had saw him in the hallway of the Wizengamot in chains, and asked to come with him, and he numb, had said yes. She was arguing something complicated over the course of several days of his trial about why he should be available for forgiveness under something she called the Reconciliation Commission. 

Harry testified, Hermione argued, Severus answered questions through a stupour of veritaserum and how it interacted in a most displeasing way with alcohol.

The Wizengamot voted. 

He blinked as he was forced to his feet, and then held out his hands as he was ordered. 

They unlocked his manacles and he stood stunned, as the Wizengamot slowly emptied. 

“Severus,” a familiar voice was at his shoulder, a hand was guiding him out the door. “It’s all right. You’ve been freed. The reconciliation commission will accept your work providing Hogwarts with potions as payment for any pain you may have caused in the war. You don’t have to do anything else. You’re a free man.”

The words had meaning to them, but he couldn’t parse it; but he took Poppy’s hand and let her guide him back to her cottage. 

***

He sobered up slowly over the next two weeks. 

Vows were made, the words “never again” were uttered with great conviction, and he tried, he really did. 

He even got so far as six months of sobriety under his belt. He had joined Helena at a Muggle university, realizing that he would never again be able to walk through Hogwarts or anywhere, really, in Wizarding Britain without experiencing flashbacks filled with rage and grief. 

If only it weren’t for the damn nightmares and insomnia he might have gotten farther. He didn’t dare touch any Potions again, all too aware of the promise he had made Poppy, but he told himself that he would only use alcohol to help himself sleep. 

He managed to keep it together for a while until it became obvious to Helena that he might actually kill himself with alcohol. 

Helena dragged him back to Poppy’s, who Flooed him straight to St. Mungo’s. 

The Mediwitches detoxed him painfully and strongly suggested that maybe that would remind him to stay away from the drink. 

His Mind Healer frowned, and told him that addiction should not have been a side effect of the Cruciatus curse. 

Addiction was something Severus had found all on his own. 

But he was newly sober again, and determined, so he dropped the classes he was going to fail anyway, wrote pleading letters to other professors, and he managed to hang on to his enrollment at school by the skin of his teeth.

And so it went on like that, periods of sobriety interrupted by times circling the drain with a bottle in his hand, until one day, five years after the Battle of Hogwarts, he woke up beside a puddle of his own puke in a side bend in Diagon Alley.

He woke with a terrible headache and groaned, fumbling through his pockets to find a bottle of hangover cure, and forced it down his unwilling throat. 

That done, he was able to force himself to his knees, and promptly vomited up a thin string of bile. 

He rummaged through his pockets, but didn’t find his wand. 

He clapped through them again, panic starting to rise in his chest.

It was gone.

His wand was gone.

He stood up slowly, forcing himself to think, and scoured the alley. 

He couldn’t find it. 

He couldn’t find his wand.

He sank against the wall again and considered his options. He had some money, he was dressed, he was sober enough to get himself some breakfast and to force himself to think. 

He walked slowly to the post office and sent an Owl to Poppy, asking her to meet him at a cafe and telling her that he had lost his wand, and that he needed her help to find it. 

She met him there in an hour, frowning. 

He bought her a tea, explained his latest problem among many other nights of many other problems, and as usual, she shook her head, tightened her lips together, and agreed to help him. 

They searched every pub in Diagon alley, used every spell either of them could think of, but his wand was not to be found. Of course, he had been blackout drunk the night before and could not remember where he had been; and Severus had the sinking realization that his wand could be anywhere, literally anywhere, in the entire world for all he could remember.

They gave up the search by late that evening, and Poppy made him promise that he would meet her at home that evening, and he thought maybe he had nodded numbly, but he couldn’t even really remember if he had or he hadn’t.

That would have been a good time to stop, and to pursue sobriety instead, it really would have.

But Severus had never found a problem he couldn’t attempt to drown in a pool of hard liquor. (Solutions, he found out later, were a different thing altogether, and could not, as the saying went, be found in the bottom of a bottle).

***

He wandered the streets of London instead, found himself somehow in Cokeworth standing outside of the house Lilly and her parents used to live, holding a bottle and staring at its delapitated roof, its boarded off windows. 

Someone must have called the cops, when they heard him slurring out swear words about the injustice of it all, the goddamn loss he had been made to endure, and at first he thought he could wave some spell out and make them go away, but then he remembered he had lost his wand in a drunken stupor, and sat down on the curb and laughed.

He was held for a night in the station, waved in and out of the courtroom without even a promise to appear, but he had a number to a drug and alcohol rehab centre from a court appointed social worker burning a hole in his pocket.

Before he even left the courthouse, he found a payphone to call the centre, and they confirmed a date for him to attend.

***

He discovered over the next several months that the Muggle system of healing addictions was much different from the gruff instructions he had been given at St. Mungo’s to quit being an idiot and stay away from the drink. 

He was expected to understand his triggers, make plans to cope with them, understand the root causes, and to discuss them with other human beings. 

That last part was probably the hardest part for him.

But at the centre he met so many other men whose eyes had the same haunted look his did, and Severus felt a kinship he couldn’t explain, drawn to the young men with buzz cuts and sitting slouching in the corners of the groups. 

When one of those men spoke hesitatingly about his trouble coming home again after the peacekeeping in the Bosnian war, how everything was different even though it was the same, how he just couldn’t imagine himself ever doing anything normal again, he found himself nodding.

The young man looked at him hesitatingly. 

“You were a soldier too?” he asked, and Severus hesitated, and then nodded. 

In a way, he supposed, he had been.

His counsellor somehow got wind of this admission, and suddenly, his program at the centre had totally changed. 

He was evaluated for an anxiety disorder called P.T.S.D., and informed he had it; he was given psychiatric medications (which he hesitatingly agreed to take), and he was expected to talk about his past with a counsellor. 

“I don’t know what to say,” he told her honestly. 

“What bothers you now?” she asked him. 

Plenty of things bothered him; he couldn’t go back to the school he had taught at without suffering panic attacks and full body somatic flashbacks of being tortured, he couldn’t stand flashing green lights, snakes, masks...

“I can’t handle flashes of light,” he told her. 

She nodded. 

“Very common,” she said, and to his surprise, he found talking to the other soldiers, that it was. 

***

“Tell me about this boy you protected,” the counsellor said. “Your friend’s son?”

He nodded. He was an expert at telling the truth without telling it, and so he told her:

“He was another soldier. Our platoon leader was grooming him to be a lieutenant. I didn’t think he was ready, but the war didn’t stop to ask him whether or not he was. He took stupid risks, and disobeyed commands that were meant to protect him... but instead of being punished, the platoon leader rewarded him for it, because the little git always managed to succeed. He hated me, and I hated him. Reminded me of his father, who hazed me and bullied me for years.”

“I don’t think you really hated him. You told me you put your life on the line for him.”

Severus nodded. 

“Many times.”

“That’s... not hate, Severus.”

He had to honestly stop, stare at her, and realize that it truly wasn’t.

“I couldn’t protect him,” he found himself admitting. “I couldn’t stop him from following through on this suicidal plan our lieutenant thought he needed to do....”

“But he lived, Severus.”

“He shouldn’t have, I don’t know how. Why did I give him the orders? Why?”

He found himself in tears again.

“You waited until the last possible moment to do it, and only then when you realized you couldn’t do it for him...”

***

He found that the other soldiers in the treatment centre always managed to find each other out. 

He had always been good at saying little but implying much, and so when no one knew him or recognized him, they began to suspect he had been a spy. Of course, he never affirmed or denied it, or that particular cover would have been blown, and they never asked. 

He got a cell phone, told them he would keep in touch, and found to his surprise, that he meant it.

His first night out of rehab, one of the soldiers insisted on dragging him to A.A. At first, he hated it. 

It was sloganistic, he was certain at least three people at the back were half in the bag, and everyone wanted to touch him. 

He took his chip, smiled and shook the hands of everyone who came out, gritted his teeth, and agreed to come back.

***

Helena was finished her master’s by then, having completed her undergraduate in record timing. 

He had committed to a course of treatment of exposing himself to his worst memories, though he had done everything to shove those memories down to about his baby toe in the past number of years, his therapist told him that confronting them, slowly, carefully, was the key to his recovery. He gave his therapist the cleaned up version, but some of the details he couldn’t talk about with a Muggle. 

He told Helena instead, about almost dying, but also about the blurry, faint and bizarre sense memory he had that Hermione had stabbed him in the neck before he passed out entirely. 

"Interesting," Helena frowned, non committal. "That's where my Mom found the potion antidote had pooled."

Then Helena grabbed his arm in a bolt of excitement as the truth hit them both at the same time. 

They stood there, silenced totally by the revelation, and gaping at each other, and then they both began to shake with excitement. 

“That’s it,” Severus gasped, “that’s what I’m going to do with my life now.”

Helena’s eyes were wide with the insight. 

“They always said it couldn’t be done, that potions were too strong for the blood”

“--The fools called it blood magic, said it was dark, forbid the study of it”

“You’re living proof they were wrong.”

“Helena, we are going to save lives with this.”

He threw himself back into his studies with renewed vigour, Helena by his side. They wrote paper after paper together, and Severus used Poppy’s wand when he needed one.

He began to feel like he might be able to see a life beyond just his own continued survival. 

***

One cool and rainy day in fall he forced himself to walk back to Diagon Alley with Poppy. He had avoided going there since he had lost his wand, but he knew he had to continue to expose himself to his fears if he wanted to overcome them. 

They stood outside the post office, talking, but Severus kept getting distracted by an oddly shaped brick in the post office wall.

He tried to ignore it, but that only made it worse. 

Its magic-- tickled at a blank spot in his memory. 

He sighed, excused himself from Poppy, and walked over to the brick, laying his hand on it. 

“Now,” he said as he felt the magic relax into his hand, “Do you want to tell me what was so important about this?”

The brick glowed golden, then green, and opened. 

Poppy, standing at his shoulder, gasped. 

She might have been warning him, but he felt strongly, in his gut, a sense of safety, of his own readiness, of a fork in the road and that his next action would change everything in his life for him. 

He did not hesitate. 

He breathed out slowly, let his magic surround him, and reached into the box, which was growing steadily bigger, until he felt it was surrounding him entirely in a tender glow.

The world returned to its normal proportions, and he held his wand in his hands. 

***

He never found out who put his wand in there, or why. 

Helena thought he might have done it himself, charmed it to release his wand back to him only when he was ready to be sober. 

Severus didn’t think he would have been that careless with something so important. But who knew? He had been a drunk then. 

***

Some few days after he and Hermione had been in contact about the grant, Severus woke up to his parchment blinking green again. 

He shuffled over to his dresser, groaning at his own inability to leave it until he was awake and oriented. 

_Why do you always call me Dr. Granger, but when it comes to Harry, you just say Harry?_

Severus held the paper in his hands, blinking. 

He hadn’t even noticed that tell in himself.

He breathed out. He noticed the feeling of his feet in his slippers, the frost creeping across his window, the yellow glow of the lamp on his bedside table. 

He fumbled through his desk drawer for a pen, and then laughed at himself and waved his wand to summon one. 

He held the pen motionless in front of the parchment for a long time. 

Honesty. 

He had cross stitched the word in blue and purple when he was in rehab, and kept it hanging above his bed ever since. 

His group members had laughed at him for taking on such a supposedly feminine pursuit in their art therapy classes. 

He had ignored them. 

If Odin had learned to weave with the hope of threading himself a new fate, Severus would not deny that he could feel magic singing through his fingers with every prick of the pin into the fabric, as he stitched together a new motto for his life. 

He remembered the feel of the thread pulling through his fingers, the bite of the pin into his fingers holding the back of the heavy cloth.

 _There are some experiences_ , he wrote slowly, carefully, _that one cannot go through and still bear to call another by their formal name._

He considered the truth of the statement for two long breaths, and then tapped it off to send to her. 

He doubted anyone could ever understand all that he had borne for Harry.

He sank back into his bed, pulling his hands through his hair and stared at the ceiling. 

The parchment was blinking again. 

He gave up on the pretense of sleep, and waved it over. 

_I understand_ , she had written. He could almost hear the hesitancy that would have been in her voice, had they been speaking. _At least, I think I understand a bit. I won’t ask you to stop calling him Harry._


	11. Knowledge

If there was a greater pleasure than waking up late on an early spring day to the warmth of her arms around her husband, the feeling of her cheek nuzzling into his back, Hermione did not know what it was. 

Ron had bought enchanted lights that when activated, danced around the room with gentle patterns and so Hermione whispered the charm that started their movements. She watched the way the shadows of the trees outside their window played on the walls as images of flowers and vines slowly blinked on and disappeared again, chasing the shadows in an ebb and flow of a colourful waltz while she stroked Ron’s hair. 

Ron was stirring, and she rubbed her hands down his arms, kissing his neck. 

“Mmm, babe,” he agreed, “keep doing that.” 

He rolled over lazily, trailing kisses over her hair, her neck. They turned towards each other to kiss deeply, but Hermione pulled back. 

“Blah,” she said, “Morning breath.”

He laughed, ran his fingers between her thighs and she forgot all her worries for a while. 

She couldn’t believe making love to him still felt like making love to her best friend. 

Afterwards, they lazed in each other’s arms for a while, but really, now they were both awake. 

“Shower?” he asked, and they went together. 

“You’re hogging the hot water,” he complained, shampoo in his hair as she washed herself.

She laughed, and they switched their positions until she was the one shivering, soaping herself while he rinsed the shampoo out. . 

“And you turn the water too hot,” she answered, watching his skin flush pink. 

It was their lazy routine, they had danced this dance a thousand times and knew its beats and rhythms. 

It was her birthday, and they had both taken the day off to spend in a most deliciously lazy form of doing as little of import as possible. 

They bought a cake together from the market and took a long walk in a park, until they settled down for a picnic in the grass under a willow tree. They watched swans swim in the river, she reading a book while he flipped through a Quidditch magazine.

“This is perfect,” Hermione sighed, letting the book down to watch the clouds drift by, her head resting on his lap. 

“We need to do this more often.”

Ron laughed. 

“I couldn’t tear you away from work if I tried,” he teased her, playing with her ringlets. 

Hermione grinned in acknowledgement. 

“Takes one to know one,” she answered. “My husband, who has been working his tail off almost every weekend since Hugo went to school. How many overtime hours are you at now?”

Ron shrugged, letting her curls go again.. 

“I think I keep going over the max limit, but no one complains.”

Hermione bit her lip to stop herself from saying something that might cause a fight on this perfect day. 

“I hope your Mom isn’t upset we turned down her invitation to come over for supper tonight,” Hermione changed the subject. “I wanted to come, but things are going to be busy the next couple of days, and I just wanted to relax a bit.”

Ron shrugged. 

“I’m sure she understands, babe. You’re going to be travelling to the literal other side of the globe. She gets that’s a lot.”

Hermione played with the grass in front of her, frowning. 

“It was scary last fall,” she said quietly. “I was worried she might not make a good recovery. I don’t want her to think I’m not thinking of her.”

Ron just smiled, and began digging through their bag for more to snack on. 

“You worry too much, Mione. Remember, Mom’s a witch. We live longer than Muggles. She’s almost totally back to her old self.”

Hermione studied Ron’s jovial face.

She didn’t know if he was denying the gravity of the situation or if he simply had not caught all the worried glances his Dad gave Molly still when she coughed after walking out in the gardens for too long. 

“She’s doing better now,” Hermione agreed cautiously. 

Ron tilted her head off his lap and lie down beside her on his side, rubbing her belly in lazy circles. 

Hermione squinted out between her lashes at him. 

“You thinking about something I should know?”

To her surprise, Ron leaned over and kissed her full on the lips. Hermione felt the heat rush to her face, and she pulled back, sitting up. 

“That’s plenty steamy for in public!” she protested with a laugh, pushing against his chest playfully. 

But Ron just grinned. 

“Maybe I am thinking about something,” he said. “Now that you’ve got your legum doctorate, there’s not much farther school you can obtain. Not a bad time to give Hugo another sibling.”

Hermione studied his smile, feeling her own fade a bit as she saw how happy he was at this idea, and felt, deep in her gut, no pull towards this suggestion at all. 

“Diapers, Ron,” she said.

“Spells, Hermione,” he replied. 

“Wrangling magical children into their pyjamas when they keep using accidental magic to apparate to the other side of the house,” Hermione countered, groaning at that particular memory of Rose, and the terror and frustration that had somehow resulted in Hermione falling giving up and letting the child simply sleep next to her in the pink frilly dress she refused to take off.

“Bundles of little joy,” Ron countered. 

Hermione smiled tightly. 

“It’s a big decision, hun,” she said after a while. “Give me time to think about it.”

Ron nodded, but Hermione felt a sinking feeling in her stomach at the terrific fight she knew she was only avoiding for the moment. 

She did not want more children. 

***

Twenty four hours later, Hermione stood shivering inside a small shed in a forest in Northern British Columbia, staring at a woodchip pile that was sprouting small tan mushrooms with white spikey warts.

Severus Snape was standing next to her, dressed in casual Muggle clothing; leather boots threaded up to his calves, jeans, and a leather coat while his assistant snapped photos of the mushrooms. 

“When you gave us the grant for this project, Dr. Granger,” he said to her as they studied the unassuming pile, “I had never imagined that this study of werewolves would involve growing so many mushrooms.” 

Snape and his assistants had found, rather to their surprise, that the Wolfe’s Bane potion did not function primarily because of aconite, as they had first suspected. 

Potions masters across the world had long assumed that the aconite was the only active ingredient in the potion, and all the rest were merely there to counteract its deadly effects.

Instead, the research that the small team had done were finding out how truly wrong they all had been.

“I thought the mushroom base of the Potion nonsensical; a mere preserving agent,” Snape said above the sound of the cold spring rain hammering against the windows.

“But any version of the potion we’ve made without it so far has been not only ineffective, but rank poison,” Mx. Pierre said, looking up from her photos.

Footsteps sounded outside the door, and Ms. Berland opened the door, the rain blowing in behind her. She grinned at them all.    
“Sorry!” she said, slamming the door against the gust of wind and rain and wandering further into the warmer shed to stand next to Mx. Pierre.

“How is Amie doing?” Ms. Berland asked, muttering a spell to swish the water off her rain jacket as she came to join them staring at the mushrooms. 

“As inscrutable as ever,” Severus replied sourly, blowing on a thermous of tea and studying the tiny white caps that had finally burst from the wood chip pile. “I don’t know how many times I’m going to say this; but it just makes no damn sense that a mushroom is the key ingredient to this potion.”

“Why do you refuse to reveal your secrets to us, Amie?” Ms. Berland asked the mushrooms, poking at the wood pile with the boot of her toe. “Haven’t we been good parents to you? Haven’t we given you water, and darkness, and an adequate balance of both wild-fermented wood chips and spores?”

They seemed to notice the smirk on Hermione’s face.

“Of course, properly, Amie is AM103, our third attempt to grow amanita muscarius spp. magicae,” Ms. Berland grinned. “103 because she’s the third attempt from the same mother spores that we took from a forest near our home; a first generation, not a second.”

“But of course we name all our mushroom stock,” Mx. Pierre laughed. “We couldn’t let our wayward children think we weren’t caring about them.”

Snape turned to Ms. Berland. 

“Would you like to do the honours?” he asked her. 

She grinned, and walked carefully over to the wood chip pile. 

“Amie,” she said solemnly, “we’d like to gift you to witches who live far across the sea, on an island called Great Britain. We need to understand more about your properties, and how you thrive under different growth conditions. You will be cared for and studied carefully. We are waiting for you to reveal to us more of your secrets of healing, and how and why you can help us to relieve the suffering of the blood and magical-core borne disease, lycanthropy. Do you assent to come with us?”

Hermione felt a slow increasing warmth in the air.

Ms. Berland smiled, and scooped up a large pile of chips and put them into a burlap bag, and then conjured a wooden box. She presented it to Hermione both her hands held out on the box, and Hermione felt on instinct, that she was to accept it the same way. She felt the hair on her arms stand on end, an electric charge pass through them, from Ms. Berland, the box, to Hermione.

She saw Ms. Berland’s deep brown eyes widen, and realized she felt it too. 

When they stepped apart, the charge left. 

“Wow,” Hermione said softly. “I wasn’t expecting that.”

Ms. Berland nodded. 

“It doesn’t always happen,” she agreed. “But that’s why it’s so important to only take with consent.”

She turned back to the mushroom pile, knelt towards it, and murmured something Hermione didn’t understand, but again she felt the rising heat from the woodchip pile.

“A thanks,” Snape explained lowly. “It’s an important part of the exchange. Ensure you follow these same protocols when you distribute the samples.” 

Hermione nodded, watching as a subtle shimmer in the air above the pile as Ms.Berland stood and stepped back.

The moment broke, and the air returned to normal.

“To the lounge,” Snape proposed, and they trudged through the pouring rain to the school, and into the lounge, although Mx. Pierre stayed behind to continue their photographs. 

Hermione sat with Snape in the lounge, discussing the progress of the project as Ms. Berland left to return to making slides of blood samples for later analysis. 

They both turned at the sudden sound of swearing from the lab. 

Snape was on his feet at once and walking towards the door, but Ms. Berland popped out, shamefaced.

“I’m sorry, Severus,” she said, “I just realized I contaminated three of the blood samples. I forgot the slides I was using weren’t the sterile ones. And I re dipped into all three of the samples.”

“The controls or the werewolf blood?” He asked, relief plain on his face.

“Controls,” she answered. 

Snape nodded. 

“Not a disaster then. Take the unsterile slides out of the lab so we don’t risk confusion again. And please, Ms. Berland, save my heart from the scare in the future. I thought you had exposed yourself to werewolf saliva,”

Ms. Berland winced in understanding, still standing at the door.

“What about the controls?” she asked him. 

“We have three controls here today, if you’re consenting to it, Dr. Granger.”

“You’d like a blood sample?” she asked, bemused. 

“Oh, why not,” she shrugged, and rolled up her sleeve. 

Ms. Berland retrieved a needle and Hermione looked away as the sample filled. 

“You next?” the young woman asked Snape, but he shook his head. 

“You all know I was Marked,” he said to them matter-of-factly. “It’s a curse that lingers in the blood and in the core even after its maker has died.”

Hermione shivered. 

“What are the implications of that?” she asked before she could stop herself, and then clamped her mouth shut again. “Nevermind,” she added hastily, “That was rude of me. You don’t have to answer that.”

Snape lifted his lips into a smile but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. 

“I couldn’t answer it even if I wanted to,” he answered. “No one knows exactly what all the lingering effects are.”

That stopped any further conversation rather abruptly, and they all turned to their respective work. 

“Dr. Granger,” a familiar voice accompanied the doorbell. 

Hermione stood from where she had been lounging at the fire and went to open the door to the visitor’s flat, where Snape stood, dripping and looking concerned. 

“May I come in?” he asked. 

Hermione opened her mouth to ask for more details, but seeing the look on her face, stepped aside and waved in him. 

“What is it?” she asked, her heart suddenly in her throat. “Has something gone horribly wrong?”

Snape vanished his coat and murmured a drying charm for his boots. 

“We should sit down to discuss this,” he said, looking down. “It’s not an issue related to the project, but it’s something you deserve to know before you leave, and to hear in person.” 

Hermione nodded faintly, and gestured for him to take a seat by the fire. She couldn’t escape the dry feeling in her mouth. 

Snape stared at the fire for a while, and then looked at her plainly in the eyes. She realized then with a start that it was great empathy on his face. 

He brought a box out of his pocket and unshrunk it. 

Hermione found to her surprise, that it contained two thermouses, and some potions bottled and capped. 

He passed her a thermos of tea, which she found herself clinging to tightly. 

“I’m not going to like this news, am I?” she asked, staring at the thermos in her hands.

Snape sighed, and sipped his tea as he looked into the fire. 

“I’m afraid there is no way to entirely soften the blow I am about to give you,” he said quietly. “Although you’ll notice those potions are rare, and highly valuable. But before you decide whether or not to take them, I must caution you of several things.

“I didn’t know you had been subjected to the Cruciatus curse,” he said, and Hermione thought his tone might even have been called gentle, “Or I wouldn’t have asked for your blood.”

Hermione gaped at him for a moment. 

“You can see it in my blood?” she asked, incredulous. “But Dr Snape, that was so long ago! I appreciate your concern, truly I do, but I have long since healed from that. I’m touched you thought to bring the potions, but I don’t think I should need it after all this time...” her voice trailed off as she saw that he was continuing to look sober, his dark eyes poignant. 

“Yes, it would seem like a long time” he said soberly, “But all the Unforgiveables leave a mark. The death curse kills, of course, but the curse is found all in the blood of the corpse. Imperio is only found as long as someone is under its influence. But Cruciatus... lingers.”

Hermione swallowed. 

“I had never heard of this before,” she said, and felt herself unmoored.

“I’m truly sorry that you had to hear this from me. They were only beginning to understand the curse after the war, and if you had never presented anywhere for treatment, you could never have a reason to suspect it.”

“What are the implications?” she asked for the second time that day, her hands clinging tightly to the insulated mug of tea as she watched the reflections of flames in Snape’s eyes.

“It was very faint in your blood,” he answered, “I could tell you hadn’t been exposed often. But the implications vary from person to person. To endure a curse like Cruciatus, I was once told you have to put the pain of the curse somewhere. But doing so burns out that part of one’s psyche.”

Hermione shivered. 

“And this is the cure?” she asked shortly, gesturing at the capped bottles.

Snape sighed again, his shoulders sagging. 

“Insofar as there can be said to have a cure, yes, this will help you to recover function again of what you have lost. But it will not help you to develop skills that you might have developed over the years to integrate this part of yourself into your current life. Some find it a relief, to regain what was lost. But keep in mind, Hermione, the story of the first Deaf adults who were given cochlear implants, and how they found themselves confused and overwhelmed by the noises they were surrounded with, and no context to understand their meanings. Many of them found it took years to be able to parse understanding from their new senses.”

Hermione stared at the potions and swallowed. 

“I wasn’t subjected to the curse for long,” she said weakly. “Will that help?”

“It is likely,” Snape agreed. “Still, Dr. Granger, it is not something to undertake lightly. And you shouldn’t take it tonight, and certainly not alone. Keep around only those you trust with your life, for it will greatly lower your inhibitions. And you should have people around you to support you as you begin to understand what you had lost, and how you can regain it.”

Hermione nodded and reached out to take the potions from Snape. 

She was surprised as he stood to leave that his eyes lingered on hers for a moment longer than she had expected. 

“Be well, Dr. Granger,” he said, and left her standing at her doorway, clinging the potions next to her heart. 


	12. Uncomfortable Truths

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I heavily editted this chapter March 4, 2020, for content. The previous chapter was much harder on Ron. It's not that I'm improving their relationship, but that I felt that the previous chapter was so dark it made the work almost so heavy it wasn't enjoyable. And not necessarily moving the plot along quickly enough. Still not sure which version I like better.... #Editting. Let me know if you have preferences, the alternate chapter will be posted as well on a thing I'm gonna call Chopping Room Floor, (Chapter 3) https://archiveofourown.org/works/23017354/chapters/55037059
> 
> This chapter has more adult content than most of my work so far. Approach with care

“I haven’t been to Hogwarts in ever so long,” Luna said to Hermione as they walked towards Neville’s greenhouses together. 

Professor Sprout had passed her position on to her protege some years ago, and Neville stood outside the greenhouses, smiling and waving at them, a sunhat sitting on a jaunty angle over his eyes. 

Luna gigged as the meadowsweet lining the greenhouses waved in tandem with him.

“He really is quite handsome underneath all that silliness,” she said to Hermione matter of factly, waving back to him. “One of these days a smart witch is going to realize that, and they’ll be lucky to get someone as kind and loyal as Neville.”

Hermione studied Luna thoughtfully. 

“What about you, Luna,” she asked pointedly, “Do you have eyes for Neville?”

Luna blushed a bit but shrugged. 

“He is lovely and I have considered it,” she admitted, “But we wouldn’t work well together. I love travelling the globe to find new creatures. Neville likes to grow roots. As much as opposites attract, it would never work.”

Hermione laughed. 

“You can’t travel forever, Luna,” she protested. “Maybe one day you’ll change your mind and want a man who knows how to settle down.”

Luna raised an eyebrow at her, grinning mischievously.

“Do you want to run bets on how long I can travel for?” she asked, and by then they were in Neville’s hearing range, and so they stopped gossiping. 

“Hermione!” Neville said, and gave her his customary bear hug. He greeted Luna similarly, and the three of them wandered down the paths of Neville’s gardens together, watching as small orange and brown spotted peacock and tortoise-shell butterflies hovered over the flowers. 

“I’ve got a shed all prepared for this,” Neville assured them, as Luna brushed her hands along the flowers that were safe to touch with wide-eyed wonder. 

“Enjoying my fairy garden, Luna?”

She grinned at him. 

“You must enjoy your evenings here immensely,” she said to him, and the two of them began to discuss the mating habits of common meadow fairies at length while Hermione tuned them out and enjoyed the feeling of being surrounded by friends, and the warmth of the garden after the cold of U.N.B.C.

She gave a third of the pile of mushrooms to Neville with the proper ceremony, and then turned towards Luna and granted her another third. 

They grinned like children in a candy store, studying their unassuming pile of woodchips. 

“I shall cherish her for ever and ever,” Luna said fondly, stealing a peek inside the bag once they were in the dark of the shed. 

Neville was digging a hole in his wood chips that sat unceremonious pile on the cabin floor, and then dumped the sack Hermione had given him into it, covering the invisible spores with swishes of his hands that looked reverential to Hermione. 

“The kids are gonna want to name this,” he said once he was done, brushing off his hands on his already dirt-stained robes. 

Hermione burst into laughter. 

“Snape’s apprentices called theirs Amie”, she explained.

“Too French,” Neville retorted. “Doesn’t convey proper dignity for a proper Scottish raised fungus. This one shall be called Muskie.” 

They giggled.

“I quite like Amie,” Luna said, “And all the obvious ones are gone. Mine will be Amie Jr.”

Hermione snickered as Neville and Luna began to argue on the merits of their respective names for their mushrooms and the three of them turned to wander towards the burrough where Neville lived by the edge of the Forbidden Forest to cook a meal mostly based around Neville’s harvest of early spring vegetables. 

Harry and Ron joined them as the afternoon wore on into early evening, bearing wine and darts. 

They drank until Ron was starting to sway on his feet and then walked out towards the graveyard at the edge of the school grounds, Ron trying to cover his weaving while Hermione grumbled and held on to his arm to keep him from stumbling too badly. 

They arrived at Dumbledore’s grave as the sun was setting in the sky, a brilliant pink red against the castle in the background. 

Dumbledore’s marble tombstone cast a long shadow over the party.

Ron was swaying as he stood beside the headstone, holding a bottle of firewhiskey in his hand. 

“Let’s pour one out for the old bastard who tried to lead Harry to an early grave,” he said, and pulled the cork of the firewhiskey out with his teeth, pouring a good draught of whiskey onto the ground. 

“Luna, you got the quills and the paper?” Ron asked. 

“Right here,” she answered agreeably, reaching around to the bag on the back of her wheelchair and then floating them each a pie-shaped piece of paper. 

“Right then! You know the rules. Call them as you make them, and no one can use the same one twice,” Ron said, passing the whiskey to Hermione, who took a swig directly from the bottle, grimaced, and passed it onto the others. 

“Manipulative, but a terrible strategist,” Harry called, the words writing themselves out on his paper. 

“Going for last year’s winner, hunh,” Ron grumbled, but took the paper out of the air as it floated over to him.

“Great magician, terrible general,” Luna offered, and Ron collected that one too. 

“Abandoned Severus Snape to the wolves with no back-up,” Hermione offered. 

But Harry snorted in objection. 

“That one’s just a fact, Hermione,” he pointed out. “It’s gotta be a theory as to why he did such a stupid thing as to not let anyone else know his spy was going to seemingly betray him., or any of the other ridiculous things he did.”

Hermione frowned, the liquor making her head feel slower. 

“Weird immortality complex?” she suggested, and the group nodded in acceptance of that one, so she sent it over. 

“God, all the good ones are gone already,” Ron grumbled, squinting in concentration as he put his paper on the grave to write. 

Harry rolled his eyes, and lit his wand so Ron could see.

“Call it,” Luna added. 

“God complex,” he said, and scribbled the words near illegibly. 

“Copier,” Hermione teased him, but Ron just grinned. 

“If it worked for years of history essays, why change strategy”. 

Luna sent an orb of light to hover a bit above them so they could see in the growing shadows, and sent her paper with the light.

“Didn’t trust even his allies,” Luna said thoughtfully, as Ron snatched her paper out of the air. 

“Gonna need a vote on this one,” he objected. “Is it a fact, or a theory?”

“Hypothesis are always informed by facts,” Luna said primly, “And although the facts cannot state why he didn’t inform others widely of his actions, my hypothesis is it was due to a lack of trust.”

Hermione grinned, appreciating the dissonance of listening to Luna Lovegood cite solid scientific methodology.

“Flawless logic,” she agreed, “I vote include it.”

Ron and Harry voted against it; but Neville was the tie-breaker, and agreed with Hermione and Luna.

Harry called him a traitor and tried to snatch the hat off his head, but Neville shrugged him off, grasping his hat in his hands with a grin.

“Gonna have to vote with the so-called smartest witch of her generation, and the only scientist here on this one, mate,” he objected. 

“You’re up last,Neille,” Harry responded. “Make it a good one.”

Neville shrugged and said,

“Overestimated his abilities, and underestimated his allies,” his paper floating over to Ron.

“Great,” Ron said, “we got everyone’s.”

He collected the notes and then stood swaying a bit beside the tomb. 

“Gonna need some help with the dart board,” he admitted, putting his wand away. 

Luna sighed and waved her wand, and conjured a dart board to hang over Dumbledore’s gravestone.

She switched her wand again and the pieces of paper flew out of Ron’s hands and arranged neatly into a circle, forming a target.

“All right, everybody in a line,” Ron ordered them, and they grumbling about bossiness and taking after his brother, stood in a line facing the dart board as Luna passed around the darts. 

Ron gestured with an exaggerated bow and said, 

“Harry, do the honours.”

“Shields up first!” Harry objected, “Lest you drunken slobs impale yourselves with a dart,” and then he cast a shield that covered all of them anyway. 

He flicked his wand to spin the dart board in a dizzying fast circle. 

“On three,” Harry instructed, “one, two, THREE!”

And they all threw their darts at the spinning target at once. 

Hermione gasped as five successive darts hit home on each of the papers. 

Ron whistled slowly. 

“The hell was that?” he asked, stumbling over to the pie chart. “Guys! Come look at this! Your darts each hit your own hypothesis!”

He glared at them accusingly as they gathered around. 

“All right, who did magic on this?”

Luna let out a thoughtful hmmm.

“Mighta been my influence,” she admitted, taking a dart out of the target and looking at it with a bemused air. “I’ve been spending too much time around ley lines lately. It does weird things to magic.”

“Really?” Harry asked, curious. “What kind of weird things?”

Luna shrugged. 

“Weird coincidences,” she offered, and put the darts away, “Everything happening in prime numbers. Nothing really useful.”

Harry looked like he wanted to ask more, but Ron smacked the bottle of firewhiskey into his chest. 

“Right then!” he said, passing out chocolate frogs to all of them. “We’re all winners of this year’s game of What the Hell was Dumbledore thinking.”

“Now let’s get back to the castle to collect our kids for the weekend before I freeze my balls off.”

They laughed at him, and Hermione forced Ron to drink a Sober Up Fast potion before they walked towards the castle together. 

***

They lay together later that night, limbs intertwining after the children had settled off to bed, and Hermione finally let herself feel despondent. 

“Ron,” she admitted as he traced a circle on her arms, “I’m scared.”

He held her tighter, kissing her forehead. 

“Of what, babe”

“I don’t want to take the potion. I’m not ready. What am I going to find has been missing all these years?” she let the tears come to her eyes. 

Ron squeezed her and half sat up, propping himself onto his elbows. 

He grabbed his wand from the bedside table and whispered a lumos so he could look at her eyes, push her tears away with his thumb. 

“Babe,” he said seriously, “Whatever it is, you’re amazing You’re an amazing Mom, and an amazing lawyer, and an amazing wife. You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with you exactly the way you are.”

Hermione let the tears roll down in earnest at those words. 

“That’s the worst part,” she whispered to him, staring into his kind expression. “Now that I know something is missing, I just can’t... I just can’t leave well enough alone! I want to take it, Ron.”

He reached to pull her towards him, and kissed her deeply. 

“I know, babe, I know you,” he said. “I’ll be here for you, no matter what it is.”

They reached towards each other, as they always did, and let their kisses deepen, their bodies rocking together into the darkness of the night.

***

Hermione woke up the next morning to the sound of quiet voices floating in from the living room. She ignored the sounds of the Floo call, relishing in the soft light warming her back, waiting for her husband to come back to her.

His soft steps approached her bed, and she shivered at the feeling of his shirt on her bare skin as he traced kisses up her spine.

“Ron,” she murmured, her skin prickling at the feeling of his clean shaven skin scratching her delicate skin, “Why are you dressed already?”

He curled next to her on the bed, his shirt buttons poking against her as she kissed him. 

“Mmmm,” she whispered appreciatively. “Who was calling?”

He took her hands in his as she slowly took in the sight of him fully dressed in dress pants and a button up shirt.

“It was my boss,” he answered, kissing her cheek. “I’m being called in.”

Hermione groaned and pulled away.

“You’ll be alright, right babe?”

Tears pricked in Hermione’s eyes 

“I don’t want you to go,” she admitted. “There’s a lot on my mind, and the kids miss you. Please stay.”

Ron smiled, grabbing her hands. 

“Duty calls,” he answered, lightly. “But it should be quick. I’ll drop Hugo off at piano lessons and then head to work. But I know you’ll be fine,” he said, gently, kissing her again in dismissal. 

Hermione just sighed and shook her head, watching as he left her with her brooding thoughts. 

***

She found herself with a mug of tea in her hands crying at Harry’s later that morning, confessing her worries about the curse. 

She had taken Rose to Harry’s that day, who was delighted anyway to spend time with Luna, who was visiting. And Hugo and Albus got along all right, better because James was out at a Quidditch practice and so they could brew together to their heart’s content.

Luna took one look at Hermione’s face when she walked in the door and suggested that she take all the kids out for a tour of her current campsite near Stonehenge. 

And so Hermione ended up on the couch, the story about the curse having flown out of her lips in one long woosh.

She was collecting herself, wiping at her eyes and sniffling. 

“Am I so obvious?” she asked, as Harry set out the tea in front of her along with her favourite type of biscuit. 

Harry grinned, sitting beside her, letting her fall back into his arms. 

“Yes,” he said bluntly, “Never play poker. You look like you’ve been crying all morning.”

She laughed and sniffled more as he held her. 

The silence stretched between them until she roused herself.

“Enough moping,” she announced. “What are we gonna do with ourselves?”

“Let’s see if we can convince the boys to finish brewing whatever it is Albus is working on and go out to Stonehenge with Luna and the girls. I think we could all use the distraction.”

And as they sat around a fire that night, passing sparklers around that sent misty images of dragons and phoenixes chasing each other around the fire while the kids laughed and gorged themselves on jelly beans and chocolate frogs, Hermione thought maybe they had made the right decision. 


	13. Insight

_ Do you think I’m crazy _

She had meant to send the missive to Harry, but she had accidentally used the wrong parchment and sent it to Snape instead. 

The thing about Ron coming home, regret in his eyes, is that Hermione always did find it irresistible. 

She and Ron had dropped the kids back at Hogwart’s for the week, plans for the quick approaching summer already made. Luna was making great progress in her study of ley lines around Stonehenge, and would be staying another six months, delaying her trip to the Amazon. Harry and the girls would stay with her for a month in the summer, she and Ron had agreed to come with their children for two weeks as well. It should have been care-free weeknight, spent laughing with her husband and planning for their upcoming vacation, but instead she found herself blinking over the messages she and Ron had exchanged over spelled parchment. 

_ I’ll be back late again tonight, hun, don’t need to wait up for me.  _

_ I miss you. _

_ I miss you too. _

_ You better be getting a ton of overtime for this.  _

It had meant to be light-hearted, but she could see in his response that he hadn’t taken it as such. 

_ We have everything we need financially. Don’t be so negative. I am getting somewhere in the department through this work.  _

_ I know but I don’t want you to be taken advantage of.  _

_ You don’t need to worry so much, babe.  _

And so Hermione found herself drinking wine, staring at the fire and questioning her sanity.

Was it really normal for a couple to fight the way she and Ron did?

Was she too negative, the way he said?

Something just seemed wrong and off about the whole scenario, her gut was screaming againt it, but Ron always brushed her concerns off, smiled, told her he could handle it.

And so she’d sent the all-too revealing message on the wrong spelled parchment, and now Snape knew she was questioning her sanity. 

She blinked at the paper in irritation, wondering if she should just leave it and they could both politely pretend the embarrassing text had imply never existed; but no, she had a professional relationship to maintain with the man.

_ Sorry, wrong person, no need to reply  _

A curt addition, but the best she could do, and she sent it off before the delay between the two messages could lead to even more misunderstandings.

But half an hour later, a message in response:

_ Dr Granger, if someone is making you feel crazy, perhaps the situation is, in fact, crazy-making. _

****

Hermione Floo-called Harry in a tizzy, and seeing the look on her face, Harry invited her in right away. 

“What is it?” he asked her, no preamble necessary as she stumbled out of the fireplace.

She came to him and held him by his elbows, her face sorrowful. 

“Harry, I’ve been a terrible selfish fool and I have to apologize,” she said, tears sparkling in her brown eyes. 

Harry looked into her eyes for a number of breaths, heart in throat, and something in Hermione broke, and she embraced him fiercely. 

“I’ve been so selfish! I can’t believe I didn’t think to ask you.” Her chest was heaving, and he was patting her back in confusion. 

She pulled away from him, piercing him with the sincerity of her gaze, and Harry said automatically, his worries now overtaken by concern for her: 

“Hermione, you’re my best friend. What is it?”

“Were you ever hit with the Cruciatus curse?”

The question threw him off balance somehow, although, why should it? He had been an Auror for many years after all. 

But the Cruciatus was truly only used by psychopaths and sadists who enjoyed control over their victims, and Harry, as an Auror, was at risk of a great many other curses, but Cruciatus was not one of them. It just wasn’t as effectie in a scenario where someone wanted a quick escape. 

And so the question brought him back, to a graveyard, to a circle of men in black robes, to a boiling cauldron. 

He swallowed several times, his head light. 

“It’s over now,” he said shortly, focusing on the feeling of her hands gripping her elbows, as he pulled away, stumbled over to his kitchen, the bright lighting, the electric appliances blinking at him; the stove, the fridge, the microwave, a world of mundanities away from that other scene of stones and blood and the grass green underneath his hands, collapsed and hunched over in pain. 

“Why do you ask me these things?” he asked, his tone harsh. He was plugging in a kettle. He was taking out tea cups. 

He turned to glare at Hermione, but she was holding a dark blue bottle of potion in her hands.

“Because,” she said, her face pale, “I’m not the only one who needs this.”

He felt himself sway on his feet a bit. 

Cursed. 

Couldn’t he leave that word in his past?

He squeezed his eyes shut, let out a long sigh, sagging his weight into the counter behind him. 

“I came over as soon as I thought of you.” Hermione was leading him to his sofa, seeing the answer in his actions and not needing him to say it.

“We’ll have to ask Snape for more, we are supposed to take three doses, four months apart.”

He sat down next to her numbly, trying to process this news, and studied the small bottle in his hands. It fit in his palms, the glass unembossed, the label in Snape’s particular writing:  _ Reconcilio _ .

“Have you taken yours yet?” he asked her lowly.

Hermione shook her head, biting her lip. 

Harry smiled at her crookedly. 

“Did you bring two?” he asked her.

She was hesitant, her hands tightened on an object in her pocket, and she showed him the other two bottles Snape had given her. 

“Well,” Harry said, with a braveness he didn’t feel, “Bottoms up, then” and gestured to her with the bottle. 

Hermione barked a laugh but then nodded, and they swallowed their Potions down.

It was a strange, tingly feeling that swept across his body. His mind became very quiet and calm for a while, almost alarmingly so, and then he sunk in into the mellow, boneless feeling, a small smile playing across his lips. 

He rolled a languid glance at Hermione, saw that she too was looking bemused, all the tension having melted out of her body as she sank into the sofa. 

“Nice,” he commented to her in surprise, and incongruently, she covered her hand to her mouth and let out a little titter.

It was the way she did it, as if it were forbidden, that sent both of them into a fit of giggles, and they leaned in to each other. 

Harry found to his surprise that Hermione stretched out like a cat in his lap, and he played with her hair mindlessly. 

“Nice,” he said again, and let himself fall further into the relaxation of inhibitions that the potion seemed to bring. 

Memories were floating in his mind, of how he had modified Molly’s clock spells to track his children’s exact locations, how he had insisted each child always have an emergency portkey, how he had hired Remus Lupin as an unlikely nanny, telling the werewolf that he could only trust someone with as much defense expertise as he to watch his children, how he had, ludicrously, questioned Remus extensively every day about what safety protocols he was following....

“Hermione,” he said gravely, “I think I may have become a trifle over-protective in my old age.”

She tittered again, said

“Well, yes, but we all knew that,” and, turned up from his lap to smirk at him. 

She must have seen the frown that was forming on his face, the little rush of indignation that the potion quickly mellowed out, because she sat up quickly, clapping her hand over her mouth. 

“Oh!” she said. “Oh, that’s your insight, isn’t it?”

Harry couldn’t help it, he was laughing again. 

It was all so strange, that his obsessive behaviours could be so clear to everyone else, and seem so normal to him. And Hermione had obviously so completely accepted this about him she even took it for granted. 

The mellow sensation of the potion asked him to push deeper into his psyche, to a place he considered well tread ground, obvious, but the potion seemed to demand the introspection. After all he was sitting very close together with Hermione on the couch, their thighs touching. But there, he came up with what he always had, a simple shuddering back against the notion of introducing any sexual element to a woman he considered more like a sister.

He let that drift past, and it seemed natural to do so, to focus instead on what Hermione was saying...

“So the part of you that’s been missing, is it a sense of safety?” 

“I’m sure, Hermione, that is something that’s been burnt out of me again and again,” Harry answered wryly, his wording even more frank than usual. “The real question si what helped me to be as sane as I am.”

Hermione nodded in agreement. 

“True,” she said, leaning against his shoulder again. 

They were quiet for a while. Harry was riding waves of gentle warmth and light that flowed through him. 

Hermione must have felt that too, because they normally weren’t so broadly affectionate with one another. But Harry mused that had a lot more to do with the relaxation of the ordinary inhibitions that the potion brought rather than necessarily any trick of insight. When Luna had been studying House Elves she had explained to him at length how mammalian physiology required touch for proper growth and healing, and how none of the trappings of civilisation Muggles or Wizards took on could ever erase this basic inclination.

“So what’s your insight?” he asked her. 

But Hermione shrugged, blissful. 

“Don’t have one, not yet,” she said, and spilled back into his lap. 

“Now play with my hair again.”

He was pleased when she decided to stay in his guest bedroom that evening, that he would awake in the morning and not be alone with his newfound realizations. 

***

They had coffee around the island in his kitchen, and Harry experienced an intense, embarrassing sense of relief that neither he nor Hermione in fact had no so-far hidden feelings for each other. She had sat with her head in his lap, after all, and he was convinced from how natural that had seemed, that if either of them had any sexual inclinations towards the other whatsoever that they would not have held back with their state of lowered inhibitions. 

Hermione looked a bit sheepish as she drank her tea.

“So I guess we’re going to need to get more potion, now that I’ve realized both of us need it,” she said matter of factly. 

Harry nodded. 

“I’m sure Snape can make us some more,” Harry agreed.

Saying the words he felt the sense of heavy magic sweep across the room, like a thick blanket enrobing them. 

Hermione’s eyes widened, catching Harry’s.

She felt it too.

It was one of those magics that now spoken, was a boon demanding to be fulfilled. It had a weight of importance and gravity behind it. 

“Because he protected you all those years, without you knowing,” Hermione breathed. 

“Severus Snape, saving my life so many times, and now healing me from the wounds of war.”

They stared at each other, not blinking, as the magics pulsed stronger in agreement with their words. 

Hermione broke the energy first. 

“I’ll ask him for you when I see him next,” she offered. 

And Harry nodded slowly, because even that felt right, too, as the tendrils of magic slowly wisped off of him, blown away in the air with the promise.

Harry crunched on a piece of toast, the banality of the day returning.

“What did your insight turn out to be?” he asked her, curious. 

Hermione scrunched up her nose. 

“Haven’t found any yet,” she admitted, clearly bothered by it. “I’ll ask Snape about that too.”

Hermione had to leave early that day, so she left soon after, having transfigured one of Ginny’s old dress robes that had been left in the back of one of Harry’s closets into something she could wear to court. Harry felt his breath hitch a bit when he admitted to Hermione he had something that she could use. It had been hanging in the back of his closet too long, and as Hermione stepped into the Floo wearing the transformed robes, Harry thought he might have felt something like relief as he watched her leave in them. 

***

He found himself spending more and more time with Luna as the spring stretched into summer.

His ski boots had transformed meaningfully into a pair of hiking boots, and looked at him with raised eyebrows one morning after he had been complaining that he just didn’t know what to do with himself any more. 

He had taken the hint and gone to see Luna, and somehow he now found himself tracking invisible nargles and wrackspurts with her around the ley lines in Wiltshire. 

He found it to be a curious parallel to his life as an Auror; they spent long hours together documenting the smallest bits of evidence, tracking patterns,making predictions, and using detection tools and spells of all sorts until the moment where the magical creatures revealed themselves. But where his job as a detective had always been marred by a sense of the weight of the responsibility of it all, a tension that had dogged him for years, this was strikingly consequence free work. 

If one of the heat-detecting traps they made to find nargles instead helped them to track honeybees or ants, or embarrassingly, a Muggle couple tangled up in each other’s limbs in a bush (never had Harry been so grateful for the power of a good obliviation, although he had jokingly insisted to Luna afterwards that he now wished that she would obliviate the memory from him too)-- these things did not end in any more disaster other than the suddenly phosphorescent glow of two bodies who would have preferred to stay hidden. 

He sat content with Luna by a campfire one evening, his arms sore from paddling their small rowboat all day while Luna collected water samples and recorded observations of the magical energies winding through the rivers. 

His mind, incongruently was on Sirius Black. He had found that taking the potion had freed him to consider the importance of memories that he had not been able to look at with anything other than almost overwhelming regret and sorrow. 

“I need to say good bye to Sirius Black,” he admitted to Luna, staring up at the dizzying array of stars that stretched out above them. 

“How, Harry?”

Harry didn’t answer, but he knew he had already settled on going back to the Department of Mysteries for the first time since that fated battle.


	14. Celebration

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Keep in mind that I don't agree with homophobic views that some of the characters express here!

He spent a month with Luna and the kids camping all over Wiltshire. Hermione and Ron and their children joined them for two weeks as well. 

Hermione had come to the conclusion that all of the memories the Potion had brought up were mostly surrounding her marital problems, but she was struggling with understanding the root of these issues. 

“What am I missing, Harry?” she asked, grimacing as she helped him to chop vegetables for a soup while Luna, Ron and the kids were out swimming and splashing in a nearby stream. “I keep wracking my brains trying to figure out what’s wrong with me, but I just can’t seem to figure it out. Am I missing a sense of restraint when I argue? Do I lack a sense of trust in Ron? I just don’t know, because for every example I can think of that I’ve done something like that, I can think of ten where I haven’t! I just can’t find the common theme no matter how much I try.”

Harry could only shrug hopelessly. 

“I don’t know, Hermione,” he said. “I really don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with you.”

Hermione sighed in despair, but Harry felt he was only being truthful. Yes, Hermione could be sharp at times; but not in such a way that Harry really felt it stood out remarkably from any other couple he knew.

***

Ginny’s Quidditch season was drawing to a close at the end of July, her team having made it to the national play offs. The kids were on the edge of their seat with excitement. The whole Weasley clan was coming up to watch the playoffs, held in the Mainland of the Orkney Isles that year. 

Luna, despite her passive interest in Quidditch at best, looked thoughtful when she learned the playoffs were in the Orkneys, and agreed to come and share her tent with Harry and the girls, explaining that she wanted to study the magics around the Ring of Brogdar and compare them to Stonehenge after Quidditch was over. The girls would be going to their mother’s for the rest of the summer, and Harry eagerly agreed to accompany her for at least a week before he settled back into his home. He still felt that he was drifting, but he had to admit the more time he spent with Luna and her studies, the easier he found it to sleep at nights. Some mornings, he would even find hiself sleeping in; and he sipmly couldn’t remember the last time when he had been able to do that. 

The playoffs for the national Quidditch cup would be held for an entire week; and Harry, remembering all too well the World Cup chaos from when he was young, insisted on inviting Remus Lupin and Teddy along as well. 

“I know I’m being overly cautious,” he said to Lupin over the Floo call, “But I want you to help me keep an eye on everybody. I know security will be high, but think about it; everyone will be expecting Harry Potter and his family to be there to watch Ginny. What better place for bitter political rivals to target us than the matches?”

Lupin smiled faintly. Though the grey in his hair had increased somewhat over the years, he was otherwise remarkably unchanged from the years when he had been teaching Harry at Hogwarts. If anything, he looked less care worn. 

“I understand Harry,” Lupin replied gently, “You’ve been through a lot. I’d be honoured to help you feel safer. And anyway, Teddy wouldn’t exactly consider it a hardship to come watch the games.”

Harry was grateful. The reunion would be overflowing with people, and Harry felt he would need all the adult help he could get to keep the kids in line..

The week was a nonstop fanfare of joyful, noisy chaos. Tents were erected in the forests and fields, with little sense of order, although the cheaper spots were farther away from the stadium. The Weasley clan had strategically bought less epensivespots farther away from the stadium so that they could attempt to hide their tents better from the crowds, using wards. But even so, they knew that without a permanent residence and mroe money than any of them were willing to spend on protections, they knew they would be findable. The best they could do was ward strongly against any harm and danger. Harry wasn’t ready to give up his cautious ways just because he was now aware of what he was doing; and so he enthusastically threw himself into the job of placing protections around the tents as well as making plans and back-up plans with Remus and Ron about how the protect the clan from any kind of danger before any of the children had so much as set a oot on the grounds. 

In the more populated areas closer to the stadium, vendors traveled through the makeshift-streets daily, selling horns and whistles and enchanted lights in the team colours. They could only see Ginny around noon as otherwise she was involved in intense training with her team. But every day for the noon meal she joined them at their large camp site for raucous lunch, the kids sitting at their own picnic table while the adults kept to their own; but still, Harry didn’t know which table was nosier. 

She and Harry sat at opposite ends of the table. 

Molly and Arthur weren’t able to come, having explained tearfully that sleeping on a camp bed in the woods was just getting to be too much at her age. 

“Mom’s not that old that he can’t handle a bit of camping,” Ron said scornfully one evening, as they struggled to get the children to get serious about the disillusionments that Harry had insisted he and REmus cast on them all. “I wish she could be here to get these monsters to listen.”

Ron had just come back from discovering that Hugo and James had been let out a play snitch out into the Weasley-Granger tent, and he looked haggard as he snapped a couple of extra strong wards on to the snitch box, having finally managed to catch the snitch after it got loose into the kitchen, breaking most of the glasses that had been sitting out.

“Mom is still recovering from the Dragon pox plus pneumonia scare, Ronald Weasley,” Percy corrected him stiffly, as he spelled the supper dishes clean and ordered them into neatly labelled cupboards on their dining tent. “She has every reason to need to rest and relax, so don’t go giving her a hard time about it.”

For once, no one groaned at Percy for his scolding.

Ginny was playing what would likely be her last Quidditch season. She sat quiet and pensive throughout most of their meals together.

The Magpies and the Falcons had topped the competition and were fighting for the gold and silver medal, but the real excitement came the day after the Magpies won. The Harpies were playing off against their rivals, the Pride of Portree in competition for the bronze medal. The stands were absolutely packed, awash witches and wizards clad in garish green (for the Harpies) and purple (For the Magpies). 

Ginny had made a risky switch from her former position as chaser to Seeker in the past two years, and she seemed well suited to the role; fast, nimble, and strategic on her broom. 

The match was incredibly fast paced with both teams scoring close one after another. But the Harpies couldn’t pull ahead, and the Magpies had a lead of about 50 points. With no further point totals to be concerned about racking up, both teams would be battling for the Snitch.

When the Portree’s Seeker suddenly sailed towards the sky at an almost 90 degree angle, Ginny too shot off into the ether, until both Seekers were so small it was impossible to tell who was who.

A deep bell clanged, signifying the Snitch had been caught, and two figures in broomsticks swooped gracefully down, slowly coming back into range. 

“WHO GOT IT?” James was shouting standing on the bench to see better. his Omnioculars pressed tightly into his face. The entire crowd was on their feet, roaring as if their cheers could determine which Seeker had caught the Snitch.

“Aunt Ginny!” Victoire squaked, her face half transformed to bird in the tension and excitement, as she stared at the sky. 

“IS IT?” James yelled, and even Albus was clasping his hands in tension. 

Ginny was holding her hand out triuphantly. 

“GINNY POTTER HAS THE SNITCH” the announcer yelled. “IT’S a WIN FOR THE HARPIES! THEY WILL GET THE BRONZE MEDAL!”

The kids were jumping and yelling and screaming and crying into each other’s arms, and even Harry had to admit a grin of pride was on his face. 

Ginny was thrown up on to her team mate’s shoulders and paraded around the stadium,when a second figure also appeared on the shoulders. 

“Their teammates have lifted Potter and Bell on to their shoulders! The Seeker and her Captain are being lauded by their teammates!” The announcer was yelling as the crowd roared. “And it seems they are somehow managing to hug each other, in a show of euphoria...” The announcer’s voice faded slightly, and James, who had been staring out of the omnioculars, carefully following his Mother’s every movement suddenly dropped the viewers to his chest, a strange look on his face. 

“What is it?” Harry asked nervously, somehow edging closer to James over Lilly and Rose’s screeches and jumping. 

“That’s not a hug, folks in the crowd. Anyone with omnioculars can see that the captain and her Seeker appear to be passionately kissing” the other announcer’s voice was commenting.

“Well, this does certainly confirm the rumours that have been swirling,” the other announcer commented, “I wonder what the wizarding world will make of this shocking revelation...”

The two droned on, but Harry realized there had been a switch of the timbre of the cheers. The formerly loud, exhilarated tone of the crowd was now mixed with jeers and booing. The happy cheers were not totally cut off, but the overall tone had shifted. Lupin signalled to Harry, a grim look on his face, and Harry nodded shortly. He cast a quick “Silencio!” and he, Lupin, Teddy, and the rest of the Weasleys were now blocked from the shouts of the crowd. 

“Kids,” he said tensely. “Take hands with your parents. Let’s Apparate back to the tents.”

It had been their back-up plan in case of any danger, although each child had also gained an emergency portkey as a 5th birthday gift from Harry, as soon as they were old enough to use it, that would take them back to their bedroom at home in case of an emergency. 

The adults arranged by Patronus to meet up in the dining tent several minutes later. 

Percy was fuming, pacing around the tent. 

He had not taken the news about Ginny being a Lesbian well. He had told Harry gruffly, the summer before Lilly went to Hogwarts at an awkward Weasley family meal where Harry and Ginny had announced their pending separation and their reasons, that he felt Ginny should have pushed those feelings aside for “the good of you and the kids” and that “marriage is supposed to be forever”. Harry had sighed, thanked Percy for his thoughts, and told him firmly that he and Ginny hadn’t taken the separation lightly. But ever since, things had been awkward between Percy and Ginny. Surprisingly, Ron had sprung to Ginny’s defense, and that created even more tension between Percy and his siblings. George, Bill and Charlie all just tried their best to stay out of it.

“I can’t believe she did that,” Percy was seething. “It was selfish of her. Now the kids are going to have to deal with a lot of bullying.”

Ron opened his mouth to protest Percy, but Lupin just clapped a hand on his shoulder. 

“Gentlemen,” he said in a quiet tone that somehow still managed to command attention, “I ask that you put aside whatever issues you may have with Ginny’s actions for a moment and focus on a wider problem here. Percy is right that this is going to attract a lot of attention, and the kids don’t deserve to be hounded by reporters. Also,” and here Lupin did swallow somewhat, “We cannot guarantee that all the attention that results from this is going to be positive. I think we should seriously consider cutting the camping trip short so the kids don't have to put up with any unwanted intrusions.”

Harry sighed, all too familiar with the press looking into his every move, not to mention being hounded by either hecklers or supporters when he was in public. 

“I agree with Remus,” he said in what he hoped was a stable voice. He’d had to attend to aa murder case once, where a Pureblood had killed his daughter for being queer. The man had been unrepentant. 

“No one would respect my family’s honour or marry my other daughters if I didn’t do this,” he said when Harry had arrested him for the murder. “And I won’t let my House die out.” 

Harry didn’t want his children to face even the faintest shadow of that kind of bigotry here, not when their Mom had just achieved the highlight of her career. They should have the chance to feel happy for her, without worrying about anyone or anything else, and he would be damned if he didn't do anything in his power to give them that.

“You are all, of course, welcome over at my place to celebrate. You know how good the wards around the house are, and it can give us some privacy to celebrate together. The adults can come back tomorrow to pack up the tents sometime in the morning.”

George and Angelina looked at each other, and then nodded in agreement. 

“We’d love to spend more time with your family, Harry,” Angelina said quietly. “We can all bring the food we were going to eat for breakfast. There’s no need for you to have to cook for us all.”

“As good at cooking as you are, I agree,” Bill added. “I’m in. And I’ll ask Victoire to bring her sleeping bag so you don't have to worry about all the laundry”

Charlie shrugged. 

“This is really Harry’s call,” he said. “It’s his kids who are going to have the hardest time to cope with this. I’ll go wherever you need me most, Harry.”

Harry nodded gratefully at Charlie.

“Of course, our family will come and support you, Harry,” Percy said stiffly. “I’m just sorry my sister did something so potentially negative. If she has to be homosexual, the least she could do is keep it quiet. It’s just so selfish of her not to consider how this would impact the children.”

Ron snorted loudly. 

“I, for one, do not think Ginny did anything wrong by merely being who she is,” he said, glaring at Percy. “I think she’s brave for facing up to any potential backlash. That being said, I don’t want to have to worry about throwing out any hecklers that might find their way to our area tonight. We’ll come.”

The adults drifted off to collect their children to take them to Harry’s, and Harry sent a Patronus to Ginny to tell her that if she wanted to celebrate with the kids, to join them at the house whenever she was able to slip away from the team. 

James was unusually subdued as he set up his room for Hugo. Lilly too, looked occupied even as she was playing exploding snap with Rose in the sitting room. 

The party slowly became raucous though, after Ron and Harry got a roaring bonfire set up outside. The adults gathered around drinking beer while Charlie told stories to the children about dragon-tending. Luna competed with her stories about the great, flaming heliopaths that she had proved lived at the centre of the Earth, and that could sometimes be seen in volcanoes. And of course, they all set off fireworks and sparklers in the green and gold colours of the Harpies. 

Ginny sent Harry a message by parchment soon after the sky was completely dark, and he gathered his children to meet her at the back of the property, where the wards allowed Apparition. 

She had Katie Bell on her arm, who looked uncharacteristically nervous.

The children greeted their mother with a subdued hug and then shook Katie's hand. It wasn’t the first time they’d met her, but only little Lilly felt young enough to allow herself to receive a hug from Katie. 

“Everyone’s gonna know now, Mom,” Albus said quietly, as they walked towards the fire from the back of the property. “The whole world's gonna know.” 

Ginny laughed softly. 

“I know, Al,” she said, ruffling his hair. “I know.”

“How do you think your classmates will react,” Harry asked them gently. 

Lilly shrugged. 

“Don’t know,” she said, kicking a rock. But she sounded worried. 

“Our true friends will stick by us. Lilly, don’t worry about anything that anybody says. And if anybody gives you any trouble, tell me and I’ll take care of it,” James said fiercely, putting an arm around his sister’s shoulder. 

“Better yet, tell the teachers or the House parents,” Harry said dryly. “That’s what they’re there for.”

“Sometimes that makes it worse,” Albus said softly. 

“Maybe it will all have blown over by September,” James said optimistically. 

“It’s gonna be in the papers,” Katie warned the kids, speaking for the first time. “But you don’t have to read those articles. You have a big family who all love you. Remember that. That’s more important than what anyone else thinks.”

“And if you’re ever worried about any of this, tell me, and we’ll talk through it,” Ginny added. “You kids know I’ll do anything for you.” The chidren nodded, James rolling his eyes at the oft-heard refrain. 

“We know, Mom,” he said, “You’ve only told us that a thousand times since you and Dad divorced.”

They were nearing the fire now, and Katie and Ginny stepped into the light of the fire last, holding hands. Ginny looked fierce, but Katie still looked nervous. 

“Ginny and Katie are here,” Harry said matter of factly. He noticed that all three of his children were looking at him and then at the family members apprehensively. “It’s the first time Katie’s ever been to the house, so let’s all make her feel welcome. And now that the heroes of the day are here, let’s get back to celebrating!”

George started clapping and the others followed as he hollered “Let’s hear it for the Captain and the Seeker of the bronze medallist winning team!”

Katie grinned, and seemed to relax, and Angelina conjured two extra chairs next to her and George at the fire, and the two came to sit next to them, looking grateful. 

Percy and Audrey went into the house soon after to retire, but they agreed to Hermione’s offer to watch their daughters Molly and Lucy so the two girls could stay and play with the rest of their cousins. Harry considered it an awkward but meaningful truce that had been reached.


	15. Commitments

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a spicy one so remember this has an adult rating for a reason

They started receiving letters even before they’d settled in for a mish-mash of breakfast food put together by seven different couples around Harry’s enormous dining room table. Even despite its large size, he’d had to magically expand it to fit everyone around, and the morning was awash with the noise of excited children, and a flurry of owls that kept zooming in to dump letters on Ginny and Katie’s head.

Harry eventually spelled the window open, so many owls were coming through. 

Nothing dangerous could get in by post past the wards (Harry had tested that assertion thoroughly, of course), but they did get a couple of Howlers. Those, he immediately banished. 

But the surprise was the overwhelming outpour of support. 

Ginny sat beside Katie with tears in her eyes as she read one of these letters out loud: 

“‘Dear Ginny and Katie, My Mommies tell me that you’re going to change our world for the better. I told my best friend last night that my Mommies are just like you and they just smiled and gave me a hug and told me that was really cool.’”

Katie slung her arm around Ginny’s shoulders at that. The two of them pressed their foreheads against one another, tears rolling down their cheeks. 

“I’m so proud of you, my love,” Katie whispered. 

Lilly ran over from her cereal and plunged herself into her Mom’s lap, and the three of them held one another as their tears mingled together. 

Harry excused himself to the kitchen to go fry some more eggs for everyone. 

He turned his head at the sound of footsteps approaching, brushing at his eyes furiously. 

It was Percy and Audrey, and Harry steeled himself.

“Don’t worry about this, Harry,” Audrey said quietly, gesturing to the frying pan. “Let me take care of it.”

Harry swallowed over the lump in his throat and tried to find a polite way to decline her. 

“I thought you and I could go to the campgrounds and take down the tents,” Percy explained. “That way the others don’t have to worry about it.”

Harry looked at Percy’s concerned face and nodded slowly. He couldn’t help but be taken by surprise when the sanctimonious man showed such thoughtfulness. 

“That sounds great,” he said weakly. 

Percy just nodded brusquely. 

“I’ll let the others know where we’re going. We’ll meet you by the back gates.”

Harry let himself walk slowly out through the yards towards the gate. It was a beautifully sunny morning and the birds were flitting from branch to branch. He turned as he heard a branch crack behind him. 

It was Luna, rolling behind him. 

“Thought I’d come with you two,” she said, and she and Harry made their way slowly to the back of the yard. 

“I’m gonna have to put out a press release in support of Ginny,” Harry found himself saying. “It might help a bit, to have a statement of support. And I might even have to do an interview. And you know how much I hate interviews.”

Luna patted his arm. 

“Make the press release first,” she advised him. “But don’t rush on the interview Harry. Take your time. You don’t have to push it before you’re ready.”

Harry nodded, and smiled blearily at his friend. 

“Luna,” he said, “you’re amazing.”

“And don’t you forget it,” she teased him, and reached out her hand to squeeze his, smiling with tears in her eyes.

*** 

He sent the kids off to their Mom’s that week, and watched as Katie and Ginny held hands with Albus, James, and Lilly, and apparated all together to Ginny and Katie’s place in the city. 

***

Luna was insistent on planting some of her mushroom spores under the light of the full moon at the Ring of Brogdor. 

She had left a patch at Stonehenge as well, explaining to him with a shrug that she was keeping the rest for further plantings, because she said “it felt right.”

Harry knelt beside her on the bare earth, the smell of soil deep in his nose as he covered the woodchips that held the spores in the dirt with gentle motions. 

Luna was whispering encouragement to the fungus, the light of the moon bleaching her hair a ghostly white. 

Harry stared at her, entranced. He thought he could see raw magic shimer in the air over the earth where she ran her fingers over the turned soil. 

She looked up at Harry’s gaze. 

“These mushrooms were sacred to my Mother’s people,” she whispered, her tone reverent. 

“Who were your mother’s people?” Harry whispered back, not daring to break the poignant silence. 

“The Sami,” Luna answered, voice still low. “They are nomads in Siberia and the Nordic countries. My mother fled Siberia when it became clear her people would suffer oppression under Stalin.”

Harry gazed at the way her arms almost glowed white in the moonlight, how the shadows darkened the depth of her scar. She reached her arms out to him. 

“Come, Harry,” she murmured, “Help me up.”

He stood, and pulled her gently to her feet. 

Luna stumbled into him, and Harry found that his arms tightened around her. She slowly looked up at him, her lips parted. 

Harry bent his head to hers and their lips met deeply in a kiss.

A shiver ran down his spine as he realized the kiss just kept getting deeper. 

He ran his tongue across her lips, his hands firm on her back as she raked her fingers through his hair. He felt fire run through his body, a hot ember already sore in his loins, and spreading through his stomach. He had never experienced this sudden rush of passion, the answering need in Luna’s fingers, twining through his hair; Ginny had always been a slow spark he’d had to flame into a burn, if he was lucky. 

Luna moaned as he pushed his tongue between her lips, and flickered her tongue across his. She pulled back to stare him deep in the eyes. Her pupils were blown out. 

“Do you want me?” she breathed.

Harry felt himself throb at the question. 

“Yes,” he said, his hands tightening on her waist. 

“Then take me,” she said. 

Harry groaned, and pushed her onto the stone behind her, falling to his knees. 

She was wearing a white silk dress that glowed in the moonlight, and he pushed it up around her waist, lowering her panties to past her knees. She sank against the stone behind her, propping herself against the stone. Blood stained her panties, but she was too wet now to be too gritty, and he wrapped his lips around her firmly, tonguing her. 

She was sinking to the earth, and he wrapped his arms around her to help her fall. 

Her hips arched up underneath him, her gasps coming out in short pants and moans as he tongued her. 

He straddled her and looked down at her face, her eyes wide and on his. 

“Do you want to keep me?” she asked him, voice hushed.

Goosebumps ran all across his body at the question, the air itself teased him. 

He realized on some deep, intuitive level, that what he said now would be as binding as any ceremony. And he’d already had the wedding, the flowers, the fanfare; he didn’t need it this time. 

“Yes,” he growled, the answer certain as the heat in his belly. 

“Then keep me as I keep you, Harry Potter,” she said, and he kissed her in response. 

She was moving her legs apart, and he took down his pants, arse exposed in the cool summer air, and he entered her, moaning lowly. 

He rocked into her as she took him deeper into her until both of them were breathless and panting, trembling, spent.

He pulled out, dazed at the strength of their love making, at her brazen need for his touch. 

Luna smiled, and put her fingers down to her entrance, bringing up a sticky mess of blood and semen. 

“Do you wish to know me deeper, forevermore?” she asked him. 

Her words had the weight of ritual, of old, deep magic, and all his hair stood on end in response to the power of it. 

Looking into her eyes, he knew his answer was a certainty within him, as irresistible as the tide. 

“Yes,” he said, “Always.”

“I bind us together,” Luna said, “You will never crave the touch of anothe. And we will always know one another.” 

“Yes,” Harry sighed, the desire to be known, to belong to someone so thoroughly a magnet that pulled Luna towards him.

Magic shone deep silver in her eyes as she ran the slick of blood and semen down his forehead.

He moaned and a silver light flashed in front of his eyes, enveloping him completely with the smell and charge of lightning.


	16. Debts

“A Reconcilio Potion for Harry, Dr. Granger?” The blood had drained from Snape’s face as she made the request. 

He sank back into the couch in her now-familiar living room in the flat in Prince George. His eyes looked hollow, and he swallowed. 

“Of course,” he said faintly, “of course, I’ll make it.”

Hermione paused, aware of the gravity in his voice. She was suddenly shame faced, realizing that she had no idea what kind of boon she was asking from him.

“Is it difficult?” she asked, leaning towards him, “I don’t mean to ask too much of you.” 

Snape set his eyes on her and barked a laugh that had no humour in it. 

“Difficult and dangerous, Dr. Granger,” he affirmed, “And I will need a month off work to make it,” he told her frankly. “But for Harry, anything.”

She was shocked by the way her magic responded to his words, that magic echoed like a bell at the depth of the truth of what he said. 

Snape too, seemed to realize this, for he shivered, brushing at his arms. 

“Auspicious,” he said, his eyes meeting hers and his lips tightening in a frown.

“Tell me, Dr. Granger, Harry hasn’t found himself cursed by any more Dark wizards of late?”

Hermione could only laugh hopelessly. 

“No,” she said weakly. “He’s quit being an Auror. He’s trailing around Luna Lovegood, studying magical animals, of all things. But I think... I think he might be happy.”

Snape smiled briefly. Hermione was shocked to see he seemed genuinely pleased at this news as he considered her words slowly. 

“I will need to deliver the Potion to Harry in person,” he said finally, thoughtful. “It is a potion that requires ritual of the maker giving it to the one who receives it, with no money given in exchange.”

He looked at Hermione frankly. 

“Giving it to you settled my life debt to you,” he explained to her. 

Hermione stiffened 

“I did not hold you in my debt,” she protested. 

“Perhaps you did not, Dr. Granger but nonetheless a life debt is an old magic that demands payment. I made that potion years ago, after I crossed a fork in the road that had led me onto a healing path. I did not know why I was making it, for the potion is incredibly demanding. But it was one of those moments of singularity, of knowing, that no true magician dares to ignore.”

Hermione nodded slowly. She had never directly experienced a moment like that, but she knew Ron and Harry had, when they had destroyed the locket Horcrux with the Sword. She had now experienced the echoes of it when she first suggested Snape make the potion for Harry, and when Snape had agreed to do so.

“And Harry?” Hermione asked bluntly, “Why do you owe Harry such a debt as to put aside all your plans? Do you truly consider yourself still his protector, despite that you have saved his life so many times now?”

Snape smiled faintly, his dark eyes deep.

“Harry saved my soul, Dr. Granger. That is deeper than any life debt.”

“But did he,” she said, wobbly. “Or was it your own actions that earned yourself your soul?”

Snape’s eyes met hers, so dark his pupils nearly disappeared into his irises.

“Is there a difference?” he asked, “Between those we act for, and what those actions produce?”

Snape’s phone chimed with a message and Hermione jumped. The depth of the moment was broken.

Snape sighed, visibly recentred himself, and riffled through his briefcase to offer her some papers and a memory stick.

“Our latest findings,” he said. “Mx. Pierre is excited to go over them with you tomorrow. They have been making great advances, and are nearly ready to be declared a full Master of Potions. Ms. Berland is not yet at that point, but she is also a competent witch and more than capable of continuing our studies. I will put the lab in their care until I am able to return to my duties; they are more than capable of it. You will meet us in the lab tomorrow?”

She nodded, and wondered how she would explain this latest development to the board. 

***

She arrived at the lab feeling ill rested. Snape took a long look at her appearance and offered her tea.

“You look like you need it extra strong this morning, Dr. Granger,” he said gently. “Are you well?”

“Portkey transportation is not my favourite,” she said lightly, but Snape seemed to nod with a more knowing expression than what she would have preferred. 

“Indeed,” he said quietly, leading her to the couches rather than the lab. 

“No doubt there is much on your mind in the execution of this project,” he said, “And I know you are concerned about your mother-in-law. I hope she is doing well.”

Somewhere in the midst of their correspondence, she had asked him for his opinion about anything that could help ease Molly’s recovery from Dragon Pox. 

She sat down with a thud, surprised at how tired she felt. 

“I hope, Dr. Granger, that you are not overworking yourself,” the words could have been reproach, but the tone was too gentle. 

She sighed, rubbing her eyes. She had been enormously busy, as usual. In addition to working on the foundation, she had also been taking on her usual amount of defense cases, and of course, making sure to save her weekends for the children. And with Ron off so often, that responsibility fell to her more often than not. 

“I hadn’t realized how much all this travelling has been taking out of me,” she admitted as Snape rummaged around the small kitchen, making her tea. “And thank you for inquiring about Molly. She is recovering, but it’s just so slow. I can’t help but worry about her.”

Snape sat across from her, the tea pot set neatly before them. He passed her several lotion jars. 

“These are for Mrs. Weasley,” he explained. “The Nisga’a do have the most intriguing ideas about poultices, and Mx. Pierre and I developed this one in tandem. It should ease her lingering joint pain.”

Hermione gazed at him, surprised. 

“How can I repay you?” she asked simply, because it seemed wrong to give money for something he had freely offered. 

“Arrange for me to have a month off in peace so that I can continue to make peace with my past,” Snape sighed, “And I shall consider it paid.” 

Mx. Pierre arrived then and interrupted any further reflections they may have fallen into. 

“Dr. Granger!” they exclaimed, “I am so looking forward to speaking with you!”

They sat next to Hermione on the couch and showed her photos with a trembling hand. 

“I just got these this morning,” they explained, their eyes bright. “My Grandmother sent them to me.”

Hermione studied the photos, frowning. They were of the toadstools. Some of the photos she recognized already. Snape had passed them onto her with comments about the growth rates of mushrooms that Luna and Neville had planted. But there were photos she didn’t recognize, of a forest floor that wasn’t labelled and tagged off as Luna, Neville’s and Snape’s test plots were. 

“These photos are from the mother patch where I and Therese (--Hermione realized she was referring to Ms. Berland--) originally were gifted the amanita spores from. I had noticed some strange similarities between Ms. Lovegood’s two test plots. So I asked my grandmother to take photos of the grounds where she showed us the mushrooms.”

She flicked her wand, and the photos became annotated with diagrams and notes. 

Hermione saw it, slowly. 

“All three are growing in the same pattern,” she said thoughtfully.

“The Fibonacci spiral,” Mx. Pierre agreed. “I suspected it when I saw Ms. Lovegood’s two test plots. But they were the only two that had this growth pattern. Ours and Mr. Longbottom’s do not. But Ms. Lovegood has only planted along ley lines.”

“And your Grandmother’s plot?” Hermione asked, eager. 

“Also on a ley line,” Mx. Pierre agreed. 

“Intriguing,” Snape murmured. “We have so far achieved almost miraculous effects with the mushrooms taken from Mx. Pierre’s grandmother’s plot. But we couldn’t replicate that effect with any other mushrooms.”

Mx. Pierre was beaming. 

“We’re one step closer to discovering why,” she agreed. “We thought it was the harvesting and planting methods at first, but that has been accounted for now. We thought maybe it was the connection between the gardener and the plant. Or the time of harvest and sowing. But now, we have an entirely different answer; the mushrooms are connected with the magics of the land.”

Hermione shook her head, amazed. 

“I suppose,” she said to her amusement, “We will be joining Luna in her study of ley lines.”

***

_ I need your help with Ginny. Send me a message.  _

Hermione had probably received the text in the middle of the night but in her eagerness to get to the lab and talk with the team, she had missed it. 

She excused herself from the conversation she’d been having with Dr. Pomfrey and Snape over lunch and wandered into the lounge. 

_ What is it, I have an hour free to talk. _

Harry responded immediately. He had probably been carrying the parchment all day and charmed it to chime when she wrote back. 

_ Don’t freak out, but Ginny’s been charged. It’s total bullshit, Hermione _

_ Wait, what?!?? What was she charged with? _

_ With public lewdity. Because she kissed Katie at the match in front of everyone. _

_ But that’s bullshit! No, they cant get away with that kind of discrimination. Homosexuality is legal now! _

_ Yes, homosexuality is legal. But there’s still some really old rules on the books about public modesty. So they’re claiming that it’s not about sexuality, but a “fair and even application of the law despite the status of one’s celebrity.” But we all know the only reason why anyone cares is that she was kissing another girl.  _

_ I wish I had more words with which to swear but it’s just not as satisfying over parchment _

_ So that’s a yes then? _

_ Of course I’ll defend her, not that this should even be necessary!!! Pro bono, of course. When is her first appearance? _

_ Next week. Tuesday at 11AM. She refused diversion.  _

_ As she should! There’s absolutely no reason for this ridiculous charge in the first place! How are you and the kids holding up to this? _

_ I was furious. The kids are worried, but they try to pretend they’re not. They’re with her and Katie still, but we all met up for lunch once the news came out. Lilly is taking it the hardest. She keeps asking me if Ginny could go to jail, and doesn’t believe me when I tell her that it’s not a charge that could put her in jail. I think she’s taking a real liking to Katie. James is mad, and Albus is quiet... so at least those two are predictable. _

_ Ok. Hang in there. This has got civil rights written all over this. The charges won’t stick. Tell the kids I said so.  _

_ Will do. Thanks Hermione.  _

_ Anytime Harry, you know that. _

Her face must have been a thundercloud because when she walked back to Dr. Pomfrey and Snape, he immediately poured her some tea. 

“Bad news?” he asked. 

She told them the story with all the fury of the indignity of the injustice, and realized that Snape was regarding her with a slightly bemused expression. 

He and Dr. Pomfrey exchanged a meaningful look. 

“Well, Hermione,” he said matter of factly, “If you really can pull the wizarding U.K.’s head out of their ass when it comes to alternative sexualities, it seems I really will be owing you yet more debts.”

Hermione felt a wave of heat at the words.

“Don’t you start about debts!” She exclaimed, “You know I don’t believe in any of that.”

But she realized that Snape was still smiling, amused at her tirade. 

“The law is easier to change than attitudes, Dr. Granger,” he said gently. “I have no doubt that these charges against Ginny won’t stand. People’s actions towards, however, are a different issue altogether. She’ll have to put up with a lot of dirty looks and name calling, I’m afraid. But still, after all my years hiding my own preferences, it is nice to hear someone so staunchly offended on my behalf.”

Hermione could only nod at that. 

***

The sounds of the crowd met her before she and Ginny even made it close to the Ministry. 

Someone was playing an electric guitar and singing a love song, to the assorted clapping and cheering of the crowd. 

They rounded the corner, and stood staring. 

The entrance to the ministry was blocked off by a crowd of witches and wizards all dressed in colourful clothes, dancing in the street. 

A stage had been erected to block off the entrance to the alley of the ministry where the Weird Sisters were performing the impromptu concert. 

When Ginny and Katie walked into sight, Myron Wagtail, the lead signer of the bad, shouted out

“Let’s hear it for the witches of the hour!” and bells that decorated the storefronts began to ring. 

Hermione noticed with a start, that most of the couples were same sex, and when the bell rang they all began to kiss. 

She looked at Ginny and Katie, who were smiling as the tears ran down their face. 

Katie turned to Ginny. 

“A kiss for luck, my love?” she said huskily, and Ginny threw her arms around her and kissed her fully. 

But thank to the crowd, no one could get in or out of the Ministry all day that day and the appearance was stalled. 

***


	17. Loyalty

The charges were thrown out, of course, although not before Hermione thoroughly tore a strip off the prosecution. More significant to Hermione, the normally empty public viewing chairs were completely full for the day of the motion for dismissal. Couples of all ages openly kissed before and after the ruling, wearing colourful rainbow coloured clothing.

The case had captured attention; badges and photos of Ginny and Katie’s kiss were sold all over shops in Diagon Alley. The Weird Sisters put out a new single called “Love in all the right places”and seemed to heavily refer to Ginny and Katie’s now famous kiss.

Hermione noticed that Lilly had started to lift her head a little less fiercely and a little more confidently when she and the kids would spend time at the joke store or visiting Eeylop’s with Ginny and Katie. 

Harry seemed to be coping by throwing himself against the bureaucratic nightmare that was attempting to visit the Department of Mysteries, and had enlisted Hermione’s help. 

“It can’t honestly be so hard,” Harry moaned, one morning when Hermione had popped by his house to get him to sign some papers so she could drop them off on her way to work. They were sitting at the island in Harry’s kitchen, and he was morosely studying the pack of papers that Hermione had received back from the Department after their latest motion for access had once again been denied. 

Hermione could only shake her head as she looked over their appeal one last time. 

“It’s the Department of Mysteries, Harry,” she said, perhaps a trifle sardonically. “What did you expect?”

Harry peered up from burying his face between his hands. 

“Last time it wasn’t nearly this hard,” he said, hopefully almost. 

Hermione glared at him. 

“No, Harry,” she said simply. “You are not breaking into the Ministry. Trust the paperwork. The paperwork works.”

“I knew you would say that,” he groaned, poking miserably at the stack of parchment Hermione was scrutinising. “I hate being an adult sometimes.”

“Just sign the bloody document, Harry,” Hermione sighed, gesturing to the pages she had flagged as she passed the stack to him. “We’ll get you in there eventually.”

“And Luna,” Harry said stubbornly. 

“Yes, yes, and Luna,” Hermione agreed absently as Harry dutifully went through her flags, flipping through and signing at the glowing lights she’d charmed at every line hat needed his signature. She didn’t know why he’d been so stubborn on that point, but then, she supposed it was better Harry didn’t go alone anyway. 

A post owl flew to the window as Harry passed the documents back to her, and he got up from his task to open it, absently paying it for his copy of the newspaper. 

“Didn’t realize you still read that drivel, Harry,” she said, putting the appeal away into her briefcase with one last satisfied glance at it.

“Yeah, well, they’re getting better now that they actually have some competition,” Harry answered, “And anyway, I gotta stay on top of it so I can prepare the kids for school.”

Hermione nodded. She knew he was worried about how their classmates would react when the boys and Lilly returned to school in the fall, but Lilly had taken to wearing a t-shirt that had her mother’s infamous kiss spelled onto it. What’s more, Lilly had bought it by mail order through an ad in Witch’s weekly; which made Hermione think that maybe the kids return to school wouldn’t be as difficult as Harry had been worrying. 

Harry opened the newspaper and seemed to blink several times.

“Harry?” she ventured, pausing in gathering up the last of her things to leave. “You ok?”

Harry sat slowly back down on the stools in front of the island 

He looked at her with something that might have been worry in his eyes. 

“You might want to sit down,” he told her faintly, “And look at this before you go.”

He passed her the paper. 

Hermione blinked at the front page news several times; the photo was of a lithe blond, obviously Veela woman standing from a cafe to embrace a red-haired man in a passionate kiss, he handing her a dozen red roses when they pulled back from one another. The scene repeated itself on loop several times. 

The headline seared through the rage building behind her eyes

Ronald Weasley, Caught Cheating on Hermione-- she closed her eyes before she could read more.

The newspaper burst into flame in her hands before she could stop it. 

She thought she heard the sound of Harry jumping a bit. 

“Hermione?” he was saying, from somewhere beyond the blood pounding in her ears. 

“I can’t believe he’s fucking doing it again!” she yelled. 

She thought maybe a glass or two shattered behind her as she said it. 

She opened her eyes and saw Harry had paused somewhere half between standing to come to her and leaving his chair. 

There was a look of shock on his face. 

“Again?” he inquired weakly. 

Hermione promptly burst into tears. 

***

Hermione thought Ron would come home that night, shame-faced, and that she’d yell, or curse, or force him into promises while liquid fear and rage made a mess of her guts. 

She hated that part. That stupid sick feeling always took so much out of her, and she usually found herself calling in sick to work for days afterwards, until he’d take her in her arms every night and reassure her, and she’d start to feel normal again. 

She never would have believed that silence was worse. 

When he Floo called her two days later she sat up like a bolt where she had been lying in bed, her stomach so twisted in knots it was actually causing her physical pain. 

“Ron!” she cried, the relief thick in her voice. “Oh God, Ron, just come home and let’s talk.”

Ron looked tired behind the flames, like he had been the one crying for days. 

“Mione,” he said softly. “Oh God, this is harder than I thought it would be.”

“Come home, Ron,” she said again, her voice cracking. 

He turned, seemed to be saying something to someone in the background that she couldn’t hear, and then looked back to her. 

“All right,” he said, “I’ll be there in a moment.”

She paced in front of the fireplace, her body sore with lack of food or sleep, the worries stewing in her mind. 

She kept looking at the clock. Ten minutes passed, then twenty. 

She collapsed in a plush chair in front of the fireplace, suddenly gutted with a new worry; what if he had been blowing her off? Was he going to come?

She found herself in a mess of fresh tears when the fire finally turned green and Ron stepped through. 

Relief hit her in waves, silencing the tears, and she scrutinised his face, seeking every line for an answer to her questions. 

“Ron,” she managed to choke out, and stood from her seat and to sweep him in her embrace, weeping. 

“I was so afraid,” she said between shuddering sobs, “so afraid you wouldn’t come.”

“Mione,” he answered, and his voice too was thick with tears. He held her tighter. “Mione.”

He moved as if to speak with her, but she shook her head. 

“Let’s not say anything,” she said quietly, “just hold me.” 

She led him to their bed, and he held her until she fell into her first deep sleep in days. 

***

She woke up in the morning to the smell of coffee and the sound of muffled voices coming from the living room. 

She walked out in her dressing gown, her stomach a mix of conflicting emotion when she saw him step away from a Floo call as she walked into the room. 

They looked at each other soberly as Hermione sat down on the couch next to him. 

“Coffee?” he asked her, and Hermione nodded numbly while he fixed them a mug. She didn’t know why tears were suddenly running down her face.

Ron sat next to her, the grave expression on his face no doubt a mirror to her own, and passed her the coffee.

“We can’t keep doing this Hermione,” he said starkly. 

For some reason those words made her stomach clench all over again. 

“Doing what?” she whispered after a too-long pause. 

Ron gestured, absurdly, to their living room: the fire, the furniture they’d bought together, the photos of their children on the mantle. 

“This,” he said, “Fighting all the time.”

Hermione reached out her hand and set it on his leg, tears in her eyes. 

“Okay,” she said numbly. “Let’s not fight then.”

Ron was shaking his head, stirring his coffee and staring into it as if it held the answers for him. 

“I’m not set out for monogamy, Hermione,” he said matter-of-factly. “I can’t be the man you want me to be.”

She pulled her hand away from him in spite of herself. 

“Don’t give me that crap about Veela being irresistable again,” she said harshly. “Plenty of other men somehow manage to turn away from them.”

Ron was shaking his head. 

“It’s not about that, Hermione,” he said, “I don’t want what you want anymore. I’ve been thinking about it a lot, and I’m ready to leave. I’ve got a place lined up in Belgium I can rent out. I can Floo in every other weekend to see the kids. I don’t have to keep torturing you, or myself anymore, trying to be someone I can’t be.”

Hermione realized she was actually shaking. 

“No,” she said simply. 

Ron stared at her. 

“What do you mean, no?”

Hermione stared at him, discussing the dismantling of their lives as if it were only a manner of technical detail. 

“I mean, if you’re asking me for a divorce, I’m saying no.”

Ron seemed flabbergasted by this response, and gaped at her for a moment. 

“I’m not giving up, Ronald Weasley,” Hermione continued, the tears rushing down her cheeks all at once. “You are my husband, and I’m not leaving you. I know we’re not perfect, but we have two children together. We have been married since we were both 18 years old. I am not leaving you, not now, not ever.”

She pointed at him, at his astonished face. 

“I am NOT leaving you!”

She stood up, went to the kitchen, and looked around. 

She was suddenly overwhelmed, not knowing what to do next, and found herself leaning against the sink, weeping as she left the coffee mug unwashed in the sink. 

She heard footsteps walking up behind her, and turned to see Ron standing frozen in the doorway to their kitchen. 

“What do you want for breakfast,” she asked him, tearing across the kitchen and opening the fridge with more force than what was really necessary. “Eggs? Bacon? Oats?”

“Hermione,” Ron said again. 

She took out some eggs from the fridge and began stirring them into a bowl. 

“I’m making eggs,” she said, brushing at her tears as she beat at the eggs with a fork.

“Hermione, I’m not staying,” Ron said. 

She glared at him, the blank look on his face, the whiteness of his skin and the circles under his eyes. 

“I’m not signing for a goddamn divorce!” Hermione shouted at him. “No!”

Ron was shaking his head. 

“I can’t make you sign, babe,” he said, quietly, staring at the floor. “But you can’t make me stay.” 

And he turned around and walked out of the kitchen. 

She followed him weakly and watched, stunned, as he grabbed his bags and left in the Floo.


	18. Losses

Hermione stared at the dull grey rain battering against the dingy bus window. Her mother lived in a small flat in Sutton, close enough to Hermione that they could get to each other by transit, but not so close that they’d get in each other’s hair. Her mother didn’t have a fireplace, and Hermione never would have been able to get a Muggle home hooked up to the Floo network anyway. Her Mother also considered apparition too dangerous, worrying that Hermione would collide with an unexpected houseguest. And so, she’d called her Mom over the phone, and took the bus.

She buzzed into the brick four storey flat, and her mother came shuffling down the stairs to let her in. She seemed to be favouring her right side slightly, avoiding the arthritis Hermione knew had begun to plague her left knee. But her gaze was piercing as ever, and she studied Hermione closely after kissing her on the cheek, taking in her red-rimmed eyes and wild hair. 

“Come on now,” she said as Hermione blinked back tears, standing by the door, and she followed her mother’s shuffling into her flat. 

Her mother ushered her to the table, brushed her hands against Hermione’s shoulders and set to making them tea. 

When the teapot sat in front of her, the sandwiches cut in half on a dish by her elbows Hermione stirred from where she had been leaning, head in hands. 

“Eat, child,” her mother said gently, sitting in the chair beside her and looking at her with worried eyes. “I know you well enough to know you haven’t touched a thing in days.”

Hermione sighed at the impossibility of arguing with her mother and managed to pick at the sandwich in front of her. 

She knew better than to press Hermione, and so Hermione let the silence stretch between them, pregnant with unspoken words. 

“How’s your knees?” she managed to say after she’d taken a couple of bites. Ham and biscuits; Hermione’s favourite. 

“Bothersome,” her mother admitted, “But as well as can be expected.”

Potions and salves with magical properties didn’t work for muggles, and so her Mom was stuck with whatever muggle medicine could do for her. 

Hermione studied the photos that her Mother had displayed prominently on the shelves in her kitchen, beside her prized teapots and cups that Hermione knew had been wedding presents. Her mother’s wedding photo stood in the centre of school year photos of Hermione, Rose and Hugo. Hermione noticed photos of her own wedding were notably missing. 

“Do you ever miss him?” she said, the words gone from her lips before she had the chance to call them back. 

Her mother followed her gaze to the photo of herself and her husband standing proudly at the front of a small church, him gazing at her with a look of undisguised adoration. 

“Of course I do,” she said matter of factly, “all the time.”

She pushed herself up from her chair and took the picture off the shelf with a careful hand, sitting down to study it, her mouth a solemn line. She passed the photo to Hermione, who looked at it closer, searching her father’s pale face and fawning smile for the tremulous man he had become. 

She remembered the way her father’s hands used to shake with a faint tremor, the thick brogue of his accent belying his Irish ancestry despite the name he had taken as a shield for himself and his new wife soon after they were married. 

She had never met any of his family, and he frowned when she asked about them, changing the subject. 

Her mother would take her hand, leading her away as her father began to stare blankly at a wall, seeing scenes in front of him Hermione could only guess at. 

“They are Catholic, sweetheart,” she told Hermione, patiently, running a bath for her as her father paced in the hallway outside the bathroom, muttering to himself. “From Belfast. And I’m Protestant, and Black to boot. He wasn’t supposed to get a scholarship to America, much less fall in love there,”

“But why,” Hermione had said, frowning at the bubbles, grabbing at them even as they burst in her hands, “Why does that matter?”

And her mother could only sigh, shake her head.

“You’ll understand when you’re older,” she’d said, but the sense of loss, the burning unfairness of it all had never left Hermione. Despite how she could now cite the prejudices and factors that separated the worlds between her father and mother, she could not imagine the rage or the apathy that would separate a parent from their child.

“Why,” Hermione asked, her voice breaking as she set the photo down on the table with a thud, “Why did he leave us?”

This was an old sorrow, and an old rage, a decade old by now; but still the sense of utter forlorn abandonment, the thought that she’d never find her father wandering the halls again, lost in the ghost of the past, or urging her in a firm hand written letter not to give up on her studies, to never let them see how their words hurt her, to show them with the power of her intellect and her hard work that she could overcome whatever they threw at her-- it was almost unbearable as the news he’d been hit by a truck one dark night by the side of the highway. 

The driver who hit him was never even charged; no pedestrian was supposed to be on that roadway, and it had been a very dark night, her father clad in black. 

Her mother was sighing, gripping her hand with a dry, firm grasp. 

“He didn’t mean to,” she said gently, “He would have stayed if he had a choice.”

“Didn’t he mean to?” Hermione asked angrily, daring to speak the words that she’d always bit back from her mother, “didn’t he?”

The tears prickled behind her eyes, and she glared at her mother between the tufts of hair that had fallen loose from her hair tie.

The road had not been meant for pedestrians. The driver had hit him around a blind corner. 

Her mother’s mouth tightened further, her eyes glittering with a hard look, but she didn’t let go of Hermione’s hands. 

“I choose to remember him at his best,” her mother replied, her voice thick, “I choose to believe he could never do that to us.”

Hermione let the tears flow then, let her mother fold her into an embrace. 

Those years after his death had been so hard. She’d had two small children to care for, and the shock of the death had sent her into a tail spin. Ron had been her anchor, the presence who let her rage or cry or whisper her fears, her fears that it had been intentional, and held her to sanity with the warmth of his arms around her at night. 

Her mother’s words were similar to what Ron had told her all those years ago, his eyes earnest, her hands in his as he spoke comforting words to her the night after the funeral: 

“You can never know, babe, exactly what happened. You have to remember him for the good parts too. Remember how much he loved you.”

Her mother brushed her hair out of her face, looked at her eyes. 

“So many worries, my dear,” she said gently. “Why don’t I come to stay with you for a while?”

Hermione sniffed loudly, and couldn’t help but nod at the suggestion. 

Her mother puttered, cleaning up the dishes and Hermione relaxed, allowing herself to be cared for. 

“How are the kids holding up?” her mother asked her after the dishes were done at the tea put away. 

“They’re not happy,” Hermione answered, “But I explained to them that it’s just a separation for now.

Her mother raised her eyebrows, looked into her eyes with that piercing gaze. 

“So you’ll take him back,” she surmised, but without rancour. 

Hermione thought of how her mother had let her stay at Hogwarts over the Christmas holidays when her husband had sunk deeper into his depressions, how she would call to cancel all his patients when he was unable to work for the trembling in his hands, the nightmares that kept him up at late hours, before going to do a full day’s work herself as a family doctor. 

“Of course,” Hermione said, remembering too the warmth of Ron’s firm hand on her back as she stood by her father’s grave, stunned but not alone in it, “Of course.”


	19. Atonement

Severus walked behind the tall bellhop purposefully, but he wasn’t so much of a prude that he stopped himself from letting his eyes wander to the young man’s pert arse, noting with approval the crisp lines his uniform was starched into. 

“Right here, sir,” the bellhop said, pausing in the elegant hallway before a double-door entranceway and passing him a key. 

Was it his imagination, or did the man’s fingers pause ever so slightly on his as he gave him the key? 

“Thank you,” Severus murmured, letting his eyes rest on the man’s for a moment longer than was really appropriate. “Tell me, for you seem to be a man of excellent taste. Where could I go for a nice meal this evening?”

The bellhop smiled, offered some suggestions of places which were much too expensive for Severus to frequent. 

“Sounds much too posh for me,” Severus replied, allowing his eyes to wander over the man’s narrow frame, his carefully manicured hands, “If you want to stop by before you head out tonight, perhaps you can show me something more to a taste we might both enjoy?”

The man smiled, his eyes widening a bit and settled on Severus’s lips. 

“I’m sure,” he said silkily, “I could arrange that. I work until 8pm.”

The man gave him one last languid look as he left Severus to gaze after him as he walked away. 

Severus shook himself, and knocked on the doors, steeling himself.

A simple identification charm swept over him, subtly done, but Severus hadn’t survived for nearly two decades as a spy by missing such things. 

Well, at least Harry had learned prudence sometime in the ensuing years. 

The door opened, and Harry stood before him. 

It was so overwhelming to see that familiar face, the years having drawn faint lines into his forehead and around his eyes, the shock of dark hair still a tumbled mess, his eyes still so green and so pure behind his wire rimmed glasses that at first Severus didn’t notice. Then he cursed himself a fool, raised his occlumency barriers as high as he could, and let himself stumble, as if haphazardly, into Harry’s chest, using that contact as a distraction for when he caught Harry’s sleeved and lifted the wand from the man’s sleeve with silky fingers and pressed it quickly into his own. 

“Harry,” he said, stumbling awkwardly into the room and allowing Harry to help him to straighten up, “I’m so sorry, it’s such a shock to see you after all these years.” 

Severus radiated trustworthiness, using all the tricks the Nisga’a had taught him to fortify his already exceptional skills in all the various magics of the mind. He sent soothing to Harry as if he were a small frightened animal, and whispered some charms over the Mark on his forehead. 

So far, he felt no Dark magic radiating from the Mark, no curse that would render Severus cursed or insane, but still he had to be careful. 

“Snape?” Harry said uncertainly, his hand wandering to his forehead, a light frown on his face, “What are you doing?”

Severus stepped closer to him, still radiating warmth, protection, friendliness; it helped that these intentions were true, so long as Harry did not move to hurt him. 

He dared to raise his arms to Harry’s face, and allowed his fingers to brush against the Mark, letting its magic speak to him. 

Harry had been claimed, that much was certain, by a witch of some power. It seemed the bond would only fade at either of their deaths.

“Fool child,” Severus whispered, shocked, “How could you have allowed this to happen? Who are you bound to?”

Harry could only shake his head, confusion on his too-earnest face. 

“What are you talking about? Bound? Snape?”

“Harry,” Severus hissed, his eyes connected deeply into Harry’s green ones. “You must trust me. You must show me.”

He allowed himself to reach out to Harry with the briefest touch of a mutual telepathy, allowing Harry to see his intentions for help, for protection. 

Harry swallowed once, then nodded, and Severus dropped his hands to hold Harry’s elbows in his firm grip. 

The Nisga’a had been excellent teachers, and Severus had always been an apt pupil. His powers of legilimency had become much greater in subtlety than Harry had ever known. Severus had no doubt now that his own powers would not only rival the Dark Lord’s, as they always had, but greatly exceed them. 

And so Severus was able to find the memory he was looking for gently, brushing over the private parts of it with discretion, seeing no need to revel in another man’s most intimate moments, but pausing when he came to the face that bound Harry, and the words that bound him. 

He let go of Harry’s elbows and stepped back, speechless for a moment. 

Harry pushed up his glasses with an awkward gesture.

“That’s not nearly as bad as I remembered,” he said, shoving his hands into his pockets. He was dressed totally in muggle clothing; jeans and a button down shirt, looking like he might be blushing a bit. 

“Snape?” Harry asked, brushing his hand across his shirt sleeve with a frown, “Did you take my wand?”

Severus sighed, considered the memories again, and then pulled Harry’s wand from his sleeve. He passed it to him wordlessly, and Harry took it with a frown. 

“I would have been a fool not to,” Severus said gruffly, gesturing to his forehead, “I didn’t know how you got that Mark, or for what purpose they Marked you.”

Harry still seemed gobsmacked, and gestured to the elegant couches in the sitting room. 

“Come in,” he muttered, “have a seat.”

Severus followed him into the room, ignoring the opulence of chandeliers and high ceilings. 

“Was that Luna Lovegood in that memory?” Severus asked, still too stunned to waste time on pleasantries. 

Harry grimaced, probably at the perusal of what was an intensely private moment and nodded. 

“It was,” he agreed, taking a seat. 

Snape followed his suit and tried his best not to run his hands through his hair in despair. 

“Did either of you have any idea what you were doing?” he asked, unable to keep the incredulous tone from his voice. 

That Harry could be so careless!

Harry just gaped at him, and then stood up to go to the bar fridge, grabbing himself a small bottle of what looked like strong liquor and pouring himself one. He didn’t offer one for Severus.

“No one else has even noticed,” Harry was saying, almost sounding grumpy. “You’re the first one to say anything to me about it.”

Severus shook his head, still aghast. 

“Very few have the powers of mind magic that I do,” he said finally, almost grudging to admit that Harry’s foolishness would not be broadcast to the world. “And fewer yet have both mind magic and knowledge of the dark Arts that I do. To me, you glowed with the mark almost from the moment I saw you.”

Now Harry was looking pale, at last seeming to absorb some of the significance of what he’d done. 

“Dark arts?” he said quietly. 

Severus could only shake his head. 

“Dark arts does not mean evil, Harry,” he corrected absently, although who knew if the man before him would absorb this any more than the boy had, “it only means magic that exacts a cost from the caster, or from the one casted upon. And this was both Dark and blood magic, which at least that last part surely could not have escaped your observation,”

But Severus saw from the blush that was building along Harry’s neck that all these factors had escaped his notice. 

“Right,” Harry said violently, swallowing down the shot with a grimace. “What does all this mean?”

Severus sighed, settling back into the couch. It was not his intention to aggravate Harry, despite that he seemed to have managed to do so. 

He tried to settle himself, to set his shock and his anger and his fear aside for a moment to consider the question. 

“You are not in true danger,” Severus said slowly, “or I would have never given you your wand back.”

Harry snorted at that, as if he were tempted to make some scathing comment, but Severus couldn’t help but glare at him, that he still couldn’t appreciate the depth of his ignorance. 

He seemed to wilt a bit under the glare, and sighed. 

“That bad, hunh?” he said. 

Severus could only nod. 

“Indeed,” he said dryly, “it could have been. The kind of magic you submitted yourself to is a binding vow that will be with you for life. Luna could have done almost anything to you in that moment.”

Harry’s eyes narrowed a bit at that. 

“But she didn’t,” he pointed out, obstinate.

Severus could only sigh, shake his head once more. 

“No, Harry, she didn’t,” he said, in what he hoped was a gentle tone, “but she could have.”

Harry was nodding now, seeming to absorb this information. 

“So what did she do?” Harry asked him, looking a bit abashed at last. 

Severus sighed. 

Gryffindors and their impulsiveness. 

“Consider the words you spoke to each other,” he said. “You promised to be loyal to her, to not be tempted to any other. A promise, which you might note, she did not make in return to you. You promised to know her-- this is a bit more ambiguous, but it could have to do either with emotional or psychological knowledge of her. I suppose that part is up to how each of your magic interprets it to mean.”

Harry was blushing now. 

“I haven’t wanted to be far away from her,” he admitted, “And when I am, I am also acutely aware of how she is feeling. I even have some sense of where in the world she is.”

Severus nodded. 

“Those things will stay with you until one or the other of you die,” he said simply, never one to shield others from the weight of the truth. 

Harry was looking, of all things, defiant, staring him in the eyes. 

“But I don’t mind those things with Luna,” he said, a stubborn note in his voice, “I trust Luna. I love her,” he said, looking down at his empty glass. 

Severus wondered by the blush on his cheeks if it was the first time Harry had said the words to someone other than Luna. 

“Yes, Harry,” he said, tired now, “but this is not like a marriage. If you two should have a falling out, you will still feel the overwhelming desire to be her partner, to be available to her in times of need. You will also always likely know her emotional state, and she yours. You also won’t crave any other’s touch sexually. She didn’t say that you couldn’t have sex with anyone else, but I imagine it would take a great force of will on your part to even want to do so. She however, placed no such compunctions on herself.”

Harry was looking even more determined. 

“I don’t mind,” he said stoutly. “I do love her. I want to be with her forever.”

Snape could only nod, close his eyes. 

“Well, that’s fortunate,” he said, aware that his tone was maybe a trifle sardonic, “considering that you will be.”

Harry was clicking his glass, and he opened his eyes, watching him open the fridge again. 

“Do you, ugh, want anything?” he asked, seeming to realize he hadn’t yet offered. “There is water.”

Severus smiled at the man in front of him despite himself. This was far from the reunion he had imagined, but something about Harry realizing his rudeness belatedly, his awkward but endearing manner, brought a smile where in years past it would have only made him grumpy. 

“Yes, please, Harry,” he said. “Water would be lovely.”

Harry passed him the water and sat with his own beer, putting his feet up onto the too-white coffee table in front of him, looking worn. Severus felt the smile creep on to his face again despite himself. 

“Not the reunion either of us imagined,” he allowed. 

Harry caught his eye, a glint of humour in the green, and the two of them found themselves, suddenly, laughing. 

Severus considered the encounter again, the words they had spoken to each other. He knew that Harry was perhaps romantic enough to want a connection with Luna, but his own experience with being bound, being forced to the company of another by manipulation or by being marked, left him feeling protective and worried for Harry. 

Luna had always carried out her magic more on impulse and intuition than study, something which either lead to great successes or near disastrous consequences in his POtions class. 

Though she had an inquisitive mind, she would throw all her knowledge away to follow a whim if she felt it was worthy. 

“Do you think Luna knew what she was doing?” he asked Harry again, as they both sat sipping their drinks. 

Harry seemed less defensive now, more contemplative, and he studied his drink broodingly. 

“I don’t think so,” he admitted. “Luna tends to execute her biggest acts of magic based on pure intuition.”

Severus nodded; it fit with his assessment of her as well. He felt some of the tension release from his shoulders. 

“I’m glad to hear it,” he said. 

Harry raised an eyebrow, scowling again. 

“Why?” He asked waspishly, “Can’t you just trust that this is something I want?”

Severus shrugged, unoffended. 

“Of course not,” he said simply, “Not if she had done something so permanent to you without your prior knowledge.” He set his water bottle down on the table, looking at Harry, taking in the man’s tension, the set of his jaw. 

“Free and informed prior consent, Harry,” he said, gently, “It’s important.”

Harry still held himself somewhat stiff, but seemed to melt as Severus didn’t react to his outburst. 

“Right,” he said, looking down, and slumping somewhat. “Of course. You’re just looking out for me. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to over react. I don’t know what’s gotten in to me.”

Severus rose his hand in a gesture of supplication. 

“It’s all right Harry. It’s more than understandable. In fact, I know that I am at least somewhat responsible for your reaction.”

Harry raised a curious eyebrow at him, and Severus took the dark blue potions bottles out of his coat pocket, setting them on the table. 

Harry’s eyes followed the potions, drawn to their magic. 

“Harry,” Severus said gently, “Did you know that in several days, I will be celebrating Rosh Hashanah?”

Harry looked surprised. 

“Er, no. I didn’t know you were Jewish. Or that Rosh Hashanah is this time of year.”

Severus nodded. 

“My mother was. We never celebrated, because my Dad wasn’t. He was.... embarassed... of my mother’s heritage.”

Harry’s eyes narrowed, clearly hearing more judgement of Severus’s father than he had said in those words. 

“I have began to learn more about my heritage since my sobriety. Before Rosh Hashanah, it is traditional to self-reflect, and to ask for forgiveness from those we have wronged.”

Severus turned to Harry solemnly. 

“Harry, in my years as a spy, I was unable to show you any appearance of favour. I do not apologize for needing to keep the mask in place that would protect you as I spied on your enemies. But I confess, that in my anger, and in my ignorance, I often went too far. I was unable to totally see you as separate from your father, and although I apologize for that--” Severus cut himself off, thinking of how he had had to bury all his emotions beneath the stiff veil of his occlumency, of how Cruciatus had burned the out even more, making him incapable of sensitivity or warning him when he was going too far. But to explain that would be to rob Harry of a true apology.

“But let me not dwell on what I wish I could have done, and rather apologize for what I did do wrong”

“I dreaded our legilimency lessons, but I didn’t dare to defy Dumbledore’s orders to offer it to you, as I should have. I knew that any intrusion of the mind must be done with someone who you trust implicitly, and I knew you did not trust me, and I could not trust you with my secrets, vulnerable as you were to the Dark Lord. I should have refused to teach you. Instead, I pushed you as hard as I could, hoping that when Dumbledore saw how poorly it was going, he would see his error, and teach you himself.

“I know this was a disaster for you, and I apologize for that sincerely. What we did met only the barest threshold of consent. I pray this has not damaged you as I fear it has.”

Severus took a deep breath, satisfied that he had said everything he had wanted to in this well-practiced speech, and looked up into Lilly’s eyes, bright green with tears across from him. 

“Snape,” Harry said, astonished, “You don’t have to apologize to me. God knows how many times I may have died without you.”

Severus snorted a laugh at that. 

“Truly, Harry, you get yourself in the most absurd circumstances,” he agreed, “Even without Voldemort at your throat.”

For some reason that made the other man laugh, shake his head, push his never-tame hair out of his eyes. 

“But Harry,” Snape said, serious again, “I did need to apologize. I was not... a nice man in those years.” 

Harry nodded, sober again. 

“You weren’t,” he agreed simply, “But you also couldn’t be.”

The extent of the truth of those words, Harry couldn’t know. 

Severus gestured to the potion. 

“It will help you find the lost part of yourself,” he warned Harry, “But it won’t help you to be able to use it.” 

And he explained to Harry thoroughly how careful he must be when taking the potion. 

Harry was studying him suddenly as he put the potions into his pockets. 

“Snape,” he said, his tone more gentle. “Have you had to take these?”

Severus remembered his years under the Healer’s wand, the disastrous return of his own emotions, the realizations of how much he hadn’t learned, hadn’t understood without them, and shuddered despite himself. 

“Of course,” he said, “I invented that potion.”


	20. Mysteries

Harry danced weightlessly with Luna under the cover of darkness, her yurt glowing a gentle yellow beneath them. They floated, suspended above it with the ski boots that had multiplied to become two pairs soon after the vow he and Luna had taken. Luna had charmed them to levitate, and now that evening had come, they drifted in a languid dance over their campsite.

The air was cold with the late fall chill, and Harry pulled Luna closer to him as she shivered. 

She buried her head in his neck and sighed with contentment. 

“I wish Severus would bless our bond,” Luna said, as they weaved a lazy circle above the trees. “I do so long to be your partner in marriage as well as intuition.”

Harry let the fire of the words bring an answering warmth to his heart, and stroked her hair. 

“I know,” he said, “Me too,” and kissed that curly white-blond hair.

After Harry had explained to Luna the magic she had performed, she had nodded slowly. 

“I didn’t know,” she admitted to him, holding his hand tightly, her eyes wide. “But my Mother used to say my Father was under her protection. They always seemed to know where each other were. When she died, my father came running into the room, even though there was no other sign that anything had gone wrong, no sound, no explosion...” Luna had shook her head, her eyes moist. “I would be honoured to be bound to you, Harry.”

Harry stroked his fingers along her hair, letting the peace of the waxing moon sparkling on the stream below him lull him as Luna’s hands around his waist sent frissons down his spine.

Luna believed that their bond would be even stronger, developing into a marriage if Snape would bless it; she believed the act needed a witness for a binding, magical marriage to take place. But Snape had refused, gently. “Give it time, Harry,” he had said when Harry asked. “If you still want this in a year and a day, I will do it for you.”

“Still,” Harry said to Luna, kissing her on the cheek, “If we have a proper marriage the children can see it.” 

Lilly had been the first to wonder if he and Luna were dating, and she had taken to the idea of her godmother becoming her step mother with enthusiasm. James seemed to be taking it all in stride. Unexpectedly, it was the normally reserved Albus who struggled with it the most. 

“It’s not right!” he had said in furious sobs, lying with his face in his pillows on his bed after having stormed out of a supper that Luna had prepared for the children and Harry, “How could you do this to us? She was your friend!”

Harry could only sigh, and rub Albus’s back, and tell him that he knew it was hard for him. 

Luna smiled up at him, and they shared a languid kiss that stoked heat deep in Harry’s belly. 

“There is, of course, the matter of your vows,” he said to her gently. “If we did have a formal marriage, we could correct an imbalance between us.”

It was a point of contention between them, that Luna had bound him to her sexually without binding her desire to him the same way. 

“My magic is done on intuition, Harry,” she had admitted with a deep blush when he confronted her about this disparity. “And so it reveals the secrets of my heart. I did not doubt my loyalty to you. But I worried about yours to me.”

Luna laid her head against his shoulder with a sigh. She was taller than Ginny, and buoyed by the floating boots he remembered that when she did stand, they were almost at an even height. 

She was softer than Ginny, too, having lost her waif-like appearance sometime as she had matured. He enjoyed the feeling of her curves in his arms, the softness of her breasts and belly pressed against him. 

“I still struggle with my own insecurities,” Luna admitted as they swayed gently. “I am so afraid that if I say I will never crave another, you’ll somehow leave me anyway, and I’ll be stuck with that vow, unable to ever find another I could want, craving only you.”

Harry kissed her hair, rubbed her back. 

“That will never, ever, happen,” he assured her, trying to put the strength of his conviction in his words to her, the firmness of his hands on her back, “I’m keeping you.”

Luna sighed with contentment at the words, relaxing under his touch. 

“I’m disabled,” she whispered so softly he could barely hear her, “Disfigured. No one has ever looked at me the way you look at me, Harry.” 

Her arms tightened around his waist. 

“And you’re handsome, and famous. Any woman would be out of their mind not to notice you, and plenty do.” 

She hesitated, but Harry said nothing, just holding her as they hovered in their dance, the bare bones of the trees reaching up towards them, their breath cooling in the air in little puffs of mist. 

“You love me for who I am. Do you know how rare a thing that is, Harry?” she pulled away from him, and he saw tears shining in her eyes. “No one truly sees me, Harry,” she said, tears running down her cheeks. “No man has ever desired me without objectifying me.”

She cupped his face in her hands. 

“I can’t swear myself to you sexually because I can’t believe my luck with you will last. My magic is done half heart. My heart cannot believe this yet.”

Harry stared at her sincere eyes, and drew her closer. 

“Luna,” he breathed, kissing her forehead, stroking her hair. 

They glided gently down to the ground, and he held her hand, studying her face.

“My love.”

She smiled tremulously at him. 

“You are beautiful, and you are always, always, my equal in everything.”

Harry considered what she had told him, and knelt in front of her as she settled back into her wheelchair, holding her hand. 

“I don’t agree with what you’re saying, and I hope one day you will believe me.”

He had been shocked to discover that someone could want him the way Luna could, that someone could hold him with that hungry look of primal need shining in her eyes, whispering hungrily in his ears for him to take her, just take her now as he fucked her. It was eye opening that he could let himself want her, let himself reveal the fullness of his need for her too, and know that his desire for her was welcome in her arms. 

It tore at him, this insecurity of hers, that he did not desire her as much as she desired him, or that his hunger for her could fade. He buried his face in her breasts, the buttons of her cloak a cold counterpoint on his skin. 

“Tell me one day I will convince you of this.”

Her hands were around his head, crooked at an awkward angle to lean towards her in the wheelchair. Tiny stones bit at his knees underneath him. 

He sighed, and straightened, looking at her grave face, her strange half-smile. 

Their hands found one another and squeezed, but still she made no response. 

He guessed from her trembling lips that she was rendered unable to speak.

And he knew in his heart that she still couldn’t speak any further words to bind herself to him.

He stood. 

“Come on, my love,” he said, brushing the dirt off his knees, and reaching for her hand.

Luna smiled, held his hand, and they made their way back into her yurt, and into her bed. 

***

“The wheelchair does not fit in the outhouses, and it won’t get through your portals,” Harry found himself explaining, exasperated, at the broad round desk by the elevators of the Ministry of Magic for what felt like the thousandth time. “Luna can’t take the public entrances even if she wanted to.”

“But she can walk, sir,” the receptionist insisted, leaning over the enormous black laminate desk, its surface impossibly polished and smooth. She stared at him across the expanse of hard dark gloss, her arms crossed against it, too far away for Harry to throw himself across and throttle her. Her eyes were scornful underneath her dark rimmed glasses, her lips a ruby red despite the grey in her hair. “I’ve seen her walk. Can’t she just shrink her wheelchair and take it with her?”

Harry found himself leaning against the desk, glaring.

“She can’t be the only person to need the wheelchair entrance. Can’t you just accept that she really does need it, and get the wards adjusted for it?”

He forced his face into something that was supposed to be a smile, but probably looked more like a snarl. He was vaguely aware that in the busy lobby behind him, some of the bustle slowed a bit, necks twisted at the insistence in his voice. 

“Please?”

The receptionist was glaring back at him, her jaw set. 

“The wheelchair entrance is only for those who really need it, sir,” she said.

“Don’t you think that she’s the best one to decide what she needs and what she doesn’t?” Harry snapped back, his patience truly gone. “There’s nothing hard about this other than you getting up off your--”

“Harry?” a familiar voice interrupted him, a pacifying hand soft on his arm. 

Harry turned on his heel and found himself glaring at Percy. 

“It’s all right Harry,” Percy said mildly. “I’m sure I can get the wards adjusted immediately for any wheelchair users.”

He threw a disapproving look at the receptionist. 

“As of course, any of our competent staff know, we are happy to be accommodating.”

He walked with Harry back towards the landing area by the elevators, where witches and wizards were stepping in from the portal above them, one after another, beams of light depositing them inside a golden circle, before they looked around, blinked to orient themselves and then strode off across the vestibule. Percy took out his wand to a glowing light pad by one of these circles and tapped it against the yellow-gold square. 

“Percy Weasley, authorised Ministry representative,” a voice intoned. “Access to public wards granted. Security status: 5th class.” 

It was the lowest security rating available, but it didn’t appear to matter; Percy made short work of the adjustments with several voice prompts and then nodded to Harry. 

“Your visitor should be able to get in now.”

Harry nodded gratefully at Percy and sent a Patronus up to Luna.

There was a flash of light and then she sat in her wheelchair beside him several minutes later, beaming. 

“Thank you, Harry,” she said, and then turned to Percy. “Percy. What a pleasant surprise.”

Percy nodded to them both. 

“Can I help you get somewhere?” he asked them, as they began to make their way across the large atrium, avoiding looking at that all-too familiar repaired fountain. Witches and wizards hurried across the atrium, covered in layers of long robes and with their hair wet from the light snowfall. 

“Can’t go where we’re going,” Harry answered. “We’re headed to the Department of Mysteries.”

Percy, thankfully, was ever mindful of the need not to ask questions when it came to matters concerning the Department of Mysteries, and merely nodded. They exchanged small talk, but Harry’s mind was elsewhere. He clutched the permit in his hand more tightly, hardly daring to believe that after months of work, they’d finally received clearance. They would be accompanied by an Unspeakable, of course, to carefully watch them, and only had thirty minutes to stand by the Veil. Still, it was better than anything Harry had experienced in all the years since Sirius had been gone. 

They boarded the gilded gold elevator, and Harry felt himself tense, caged. His throat was dry his stomach was clenching as he thought about the long, all black corridors he was about to head into. His hand reached out to Luna’s, and they caught each other’s fingers almost without looking at each other. 

He felt a sense of comfort flow through the Bond from her to him. Percy kept a small stream of meaningless chatter with Luna, and Harry concentrated on settling his traitorous stomach.

The elevator dinged as it descended, a voice stating each floor as it went. 

Percy got out at the level for the political offices, wishing them both well, but Luna and Harry descended further. 

“Department of Mysteries,” the voice intoned, and Luna and Harry stepped out into the unremarkable white corridor. 

A man in dark robes stood before them, vaguely familiar, with strong shoulders and a blunt, blue gaze and a square jaw. 

He looked at them with a calculating gaze. 

“Wands, please,” he said, holding out his hand. 

Harry reluctantly relinquished his wand, and the man set it in a black box, which identified:

“Eleven inches, Holly wood with a phoenix feather core. Property of Harry Potter.”

The man nodded, satisfied, and passed the wand back to Harry, and then did the same for Luna. 

Harry was staring at the line of the man’s jaw, the darkness of his hair. 

“Are you related to Millicent Bulstrode?” he asked finally, something clicking in to place in his mind. 

The man smirked. 

“No, Potter,” he replied lazily, turning on his heel and gesturing for them to follow him through the corridor, towards the shut black door behind him. “I am-- or at least, I was, Millicent Bulstrode.”

Harry clicked his jaw shut, studying the man’s well built physique, and reminded himself not to underestimate the power of Potions ever again. 

“You will call me Mal now,” Mal said matter of factly, as he opened the all black door “considering I am no longer a woman.”

Harry nodded mutely and stepped through the door, and all thoughts of gender and identity and politics were sucked from his mind. 

The hall was impossibly long, impossibly black; onyx ceilings, onyx floor, onyx walls. The walls were light by wall sconces, but the black walls seemed to suck all the colours of the world from them, and Harry felt himself pulled back in time. Their footsteps were a harsh counterpoint to the colour drained world, clicking loudly against the stone floor.

They came to a familiar circular vestibule, the roof suddenly arching up into a dome. A series of closed doors mocked him with their similarity, their memories. 

Mal gestured to one of them, his face harsh with shadows in the firelight, but his voice suddenly pulled Harry back to the present with its mundanity, his technical clarity. 

“This room contains the Veil,” he said matter of factly. “You will not step behind it. You will not do magic in its presence. You may only observe it. You disobey these rules at your own peril. You will be done in thirty minutes time, at which time the room itself will eject you if you do not leave of your own free will.”

He held out the box again, and Harry and Luna reluctantly passed their wands to him. Harry thought he heard Luna sigh a little as Mal clicked the box closed. 

A hole appeared in the wall by the door, and Mal placed the box in it; and the door swung open. 

He stepped back from the eerie light that emanated from it, his eyebrows raised. 

“Thirty minutes,” he repeated. “The door will open when it’s over, and you can retrieve your wands then. I will be waiting.”

Harry looked towards Luna, and they stepped into the door together. 

The room was dimly lit, glowing with the grey-white light emanating from the arch. Luna and Harry descended the granite steps together, wordless, the empty benches that lined the room absurdly reminding Harry of sports stadiums. Their hands brushed against one another, but he didn’t hold hers. 

The benches were grey, and twinkled with trapped bits of mica as they descend towards the pit that held the arch on its raised dais. The arch, unsupported stood in the centre of a dais at the bottom of the room, and they drew towards it, silent. 

The black Veil rippled, hanging off the arch , the eerie grey light emanating from the sides of it.

They halted in the pit below the dais, staring up at it. 

Harry dared to gaze over at Luna, and saw that she was staring, her mouth gaping open. 

They had intended on studying it quietly from the distance of the pit, of speaking words of sorrow, grief, good byes. 

But all those thoughts vanished before the enormity of the Veil, the arch, the light. 

Luna caught his gaze, and they nodded to one another, and then they turned back to the Veil. They walked together in tandem, up the steps of the dais and towards the arch. 

He could hear the whispers now, wordless from behind the Veil, and he halted in front of it, stricken with grief and sorrow and an ephemeral, quickly departing sense of connection to the light and the voices behind the Veil. 

He stood before the centre of the archway, transfixed by the ripple of the veil. Luna was leaning down from her wheelchair to study the base of the arches. He vaguely saw she was studying the runes there with a frown on her face, brushing them with her fingers. 

He opened his mouth to speak, but felt as if all the words in the world were pulled from him, sucked towards the darkness of the veil and the rippling light behind it. 

He shut his mouth and stared back at the Veil, silent again. 

Luna rolled towards him. 

He stretched out his hand, and the moment was suspended suddenly between them in time, like the moment before lightning struck, before a drop of water erupted the calm of the clear surface below. 

A hesitation. 

And then a certainty, a connection, and they found each other's hands. 

The light behind the Veil blasted like lightning, blinding and saturated them with blanch white. 

They were thrown apart from each other, blasted back with light and fury into the wall twenty feet above and behind them. 

Silence, the pounding of his heart in his ears, and then life screeched to sound and fury around him once more.

Harry was vaguely aware of piercing sirens, an emergency light in red lighting along the walls of the room, and the sound of huge stones crashing into the stone floor beneath him before everything faded to blackness and to the iron taste of blood in his mouth. 


	21. Endings

Hermione sat beside Harry’s bed in St.Mungo’s, holding his hand as a charmed light pulsed with a reassuring steadiness above him. Whatever else was wrong with Harry, his heart was as strong as ever. 

“Only you,” she whispered, squeezing his hand as tears threatened to overflow, “could send the Veil tumbling down.”

Probably, she never should have been informed of this detail. But Mal had escorted Harry and Luna to St. Mungo’s personally, shaking with rage at Hermione as he demanded to know if she knew what they had been scheming; what they had schemed, and how they had done it. Snarling, he had threatened to take legal action against Harry, and as his emergency contact she had made herself his lawyer as well. He shouted about the value of the Veil until mollified, he blushed a deep red and reminded her everything he had hurled at her inside the cramped private waiting room where she sat hoping for news of Harry was “of course, completely confidential, under your oath as a lawyer.” Hermione had nodded and they both pretended Mal had remembered this all along.

Hermione wasn’t above bribing Mal with tea and placating him, telling him that as Harry’s lawyer, she needed to know exactly what he had done. But Mal could only helplessly shrug. Nobody knew what had happened behind that locked door. Harry and Luna had both been thoroughly scanned by Mal before entering the Department, and other than Luna’s wheelchair, they had been cleared for passage. Their wands were found still locked in the wall, no unusual spells detected.

Mal had left hours earlier, threatening a barrage of paperwork, of an armed guard, but Hermione had expected it was bluster. No Auror could take the job of guarding the Chosen One seriously, not when he had also been a recent colleague.

And so she was alone with Harry and Luna, sitting by their bedside. 

They would have normally each warranted a private room, but when the Healers attempted to separate them, their pulse went haywire. After multiple diagnostic spells well beyond Hermione’s comprehension, and several Healers had been called in one of the senior Healers had frowned, shook his head, and simply informed the staff that Harry and Luna were not to be separated until they were both conscious. 

Hermione tried not to feel too guilty that she had gravitated to Harry’s bedside. Luna was a dear friend, but she was not the one who Hermione had repeatedly risked her life to protect.

James, Albus and Lilly had only been willing to leave the hospital when Ginny had all but dragged them out, although even then Hermione had expected that had more to do with her own promises to stay the night with Harry, and to send word with any change of his condition.

Xenophilius had sat with Luna for a long time, studying her and then Harry with a knowing look in his eye, and then departed finally when a mediwitch appeared at the doorway, stating that visiting hours were over. Hermione had merely stared at the witch, and she had sighed, and allowed Hermione to spell her bedside chair to be more comfortable. 

She was Harry’s emergency contact after all, but she was surprised to note that sometime after the divorce Harry had appointed of her as his power of attorney for health as well. And so Hermione sat, and waited for Ron to join her. 

Her mother was at home with the kids, who had returned several days before for the winter holidays. She had raised an eyebrow when Hermione had stated confidently that Ron would come to join her by Harry’s bedside as soon as he was able to Portkey from Australia. 

“You still trust him?” she had said, skeptical. 

“Of course I trust him,” Hermione had snapped back, wrapping her scarf around her neck and reaching towards the Floo powder. 

“My dear, he hasn’t come back,” her mother said, her tone gentle. “And however much you try to hide it, Rose has told me that she worries he won’t, that she saw in the paper that he’s dating someone else. How can you trust him?”

Hermione had blinked back the tears, tired of answering the same questions all her cose friends had asked her. 

“I know what I can trust Ron on,” she answered finally, “I trust Ron to be Ron. I know he’ll mess around with other women. But I know he always comes home to me. And none of that is anyone’s business anyway!”

Her mother studied her, impassive. 

“It matters,” she said finally, “If it matters to you.”

Hermione shrugged and wiped the tears away. 

“I can’t stop it,” she answered, “I don’t even think he could stop himself if he wanted to. But I know that I can trust him to come home, and to be there for me when it’s really important. Isn’t that the most important thing?”

Her mother sighed, looked away. 

“Just take care of yourself, Hermione,” she said, and Hermione had nodded, sprinkled the powder in the fireplace, and was sucked in the horrible whirlwind to St. Mungo’s. 

It was near midnight when a familiar hand touched her shoulder. 

She jerked up, amazed that she had somehow managed to fall asleep curled up in the chair. 

“Ron,” she whispered, and stood to embrace him.

He felt stiff in her arms, but she held him tightly. 

“I knew you would come,” she said, voice muffled in his shirt. 

He pulled away from her, squeezed her hands. 

His hair was disheveled, and there were tired circles under his eyes. 

“Of course,” he said quietly, “Of course I came”

They sat by Harry’s bedside until deep into the night, when a flurry of medical activity once again roused Hermione from her sleep. 

Lights had flared on brightly in the room, quickly changing colours in a dizzying array of sparking and shooting lights. A song of trickling bells was spelled into the air, light and fast and breezy, anxious. Healers and medi-witches and wizards crowded around Harry and Luna’s bedside. 

“Accidental magic,” a voice said, “his core is going wild now that he’s waking. It has to let the magic out somehow.”

“My God, look at its strength!”

“Don’t! Stop that containment spell immediately, Hudson! It will make it worse! Let them burn it off in these harmless spells.”

More flurrying, the beeping and tinkling of spelled instruments, instructions passed from one another. The song grew louder, but less insistent. The lights stopped spinning colours. 

“It’s stabilizing now,”

“Harry, Harry do you hear us?”

And then a voice, croaky but familiar:

“Yeah, I hear you.”

“You’re at the hospital, Harry, St. Mungo’s.”

Hermione realized she was gripping Ron’s hand tightly, as he gently eased her off his fingers. 

One of the mediwitches started, seeming to finally realize that there were two visitors in the room watching the entire affair, and lead them outside the room and into the hallway. 

“He’s conscious,” she explained, unnecessarily. “But his magic is going a bit wild. We need you two out of the room for a while.”

She left Ron and Hermione to pace the hallways for what felt like hours, until at last an older Healer stepped into the hallway and found them. She was dressed in crisp Healer robes, her dark eyes bright despite the late hour. She carried herself with the confident bearing of someone used to knowing her place in the world, despite that she was several inches shorter than Hermione.

“You’re with Luna Lovegood and Harry Potter?” She asked them, officious.

“What’s happened?” Hermione burst out before she could stop herself. 

The Healer frowned slightly, her brown eyes crinkling as she studied Hermione and Ron. 

“You’re family?” she asked. 

Hermione opened her mouth to answer, but Ron answered first. 

“His brother,” he said firmly, and after a blink, the Healer nodded. 

“I’m Healer Uma Kaur. I specialize in magical energies. We don’t know how, but it seems their magical core has been-- augmented. Harry and Luna’s both.”

“Augmented?” Ron echoed. 

“Do you mean Harry’s going to be even more powerful than he already is?” Hermione gaped. 

The Healer seemed to shrug. 

“We really can’t know how this will affect him or Luna in the long term. It seems they’ve both been exposed to a very strong, very old magic, and he has at least in part absorbed it. He came in with minor injuries, a concussion, broken bones, and we’ve been healing those. Luna was similar, although it’s a bit more complicated with the pre-existing damage to her legs. But we didn’t know until he was conscious how the magical charge we saw emanating from him would resolve. They awoke at approximately the same time. Now that he and Luna are conscious, we can guess that the magic has been integrated enough into their core that they will be able to use it, rather than the risk that we had feared of it burning them out.”

Hermione nodded, grim. 

She knew the risk of so much excess magic was that Harry and Luna would have completely dissolved their magic. 

“What are the implications of all this?” she thought to ask. 

The mediwitch frowned.

“We don’t know all of them, yet,” she admitted. “Their magic may be a bit unstable until they can learn to control the excess strength they have now. It seems their magic knew to siphon some of it off, into harmless spells like the lightshow you saw, or the music.”

Hermione nodded, feeling drained. 

“Are they going to be okay?” she asked in a small voice. 

Here the Healer smiled, her deep brown eyes warm in her face. She reached out to touch Hermione’s shoulder with a gentle grasp. 

“They’re through the worst,” she said gently. “We know they can still use magic, they can both communicate clearly, they’re oriented to time and place. They don’t seem to be experiencing any perceptual abnormalities, and their emotions seem stable. Their bones are healed. What they need now is simply rest. There’s no need to keep a night watch any longer. I suggest you both get some rest.”

Hermione nodded dumbly. 

“Thank you Healer Kaur,” she managed around the lump in her throat. The hand on her shoulder squeezed tighter, and then the diminutive women nodded at them both, and left her to slump against the wall, eyes closed. 

“Hermione,” Ron’s voice brought her back to the too-white hallway with a start. “You’re exhausted.” 

He had her by the elbow and was gently leading her towards the elevators. 

“It’s time for you to go home and get some sleep. Harry will be here in the morning.”

“What about you?” she asked, numb. 

“I’ll go back to my place to get some rest too. I’ll see Harry in the morning, after I’ve got some rest.”

“Your place?” Hermione repeated. 

“In Belgium,” Ron agreed, gentle. “I had an international Portkey approved for personal use, but it’s close enough to only have to take one. It’s why I chose Belgium.”

“Oh,” Hermione answered, blankly. 

Ron was leading her to the Floo in the deserted lobby, but her thoughts were whirling. Ron threw the Floo powder in for her, and she managed to mutter her address through the fog in her brain. 

It was when she stepped into her living room alone that it hit her. 

She collapsed into the couch across from her fireplace, sobbing. 

Footsteps sounded down the hallway. 

Her mother was sitting next to her on the couch, rubbing her back. 

“Hermione?” she asked. “Is your friend alright?”

“Harry’s fine,” Hermione sobbed, “Luna’s fine.”

“Shhhh, my dear girl, you’ll wake the children.”

Hermione quieted her sobs, her body wracking silently with shudders. 

“What is it, my child.”

“Ron. He’s not-- he’s not coming back. He’s not coming home.”

The hand on her back paused in its rubbing. 

“He hasn’t for a while,” her Mom said, gently. 

“But he always comes when things are wrong. Always! If he isn’t coming home now, it means he’s gone...” her tears overtook her once more “He’s really gone.”

Her mother shifted so she could hold Hermione entirely in her strong arms, let her cry until she was too exhausted to move, but nothing could soothe the dead knowledge in her gut that Ron really, truly, completely, would never be her husband again. 

END PART ONE.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello lovelies! This is the end of part one of this book. However, the story is obviously very much not finished. Although I'm somewhat tempted to post the second part of this book as a separate part of the series, I've decided not to, as I'm afraid that this part one, if read alone, is really quite tragic!  
> Part One has been mostly concerned with relationships and the character's internal development.  
> Part Two will have a very different tone, a faster pace, more plot. I had never really intended on this story being more than an explorationo of character development and relationships... but it turns out, I seem to have a story to tell!  
> I'm looking forward to continuing this and thanks for being with me on this ride so far!


	22. Part Two: Prologue

When Hermione was 18 years old, fresh home from the war and living under her parents roof for the first time in almost a decade, her mother broke her wand in two.

Hermione was peeling tomatoes, trying not to get too much juice on the sapphire engagement ring that still sparkled new and unfamiliar on her finger. Her mother was bent over the stovetop, stirring pungent smelling spices into a curry. 

“How are you adjusting to England again?” Hermione asked uncertainly. 

Her mother had not taken well to discovering that Hermione had wiped her memory and sent her packing to Australia for the year she had been fighting in the war. Their days together had been filled with slowly returning realizations, questions, and tense fights about what Hermione had done and why. 

Pearlie turned from the stove, frowning. 

“I still find myself craving knitting,” she said, voice affronted. She reached out her hand with an impatient gesture for the tomatoes, and Hermione passed the chopping board to her. 

It surprised Hermione, after years of boarding school, how little she knew her mother. 

But they had always found a common ground in cooking, her mother teaching her recipes for stewed greens, black eyed peas, candied yams; the sweet and heavy meals of her youth, or jumbos and curries that she’d learned from her time in Louisiana. 

“You know, when your father and I talked about retiring to a sheep farm in Australia, it was a joke,” Pearlie groused, scraping the tomatoes off the chopping board and into the stew. 

Hermione suppressed a sigh. 

It was a well tread argument between the two of them, and she didn’t really feel like re-igniting it now. Her mind wandered elsewhere as she hummed noncommittally at her mother’s anger, hoping she could brush it off. She wanted to get back to the Burrow, back to Ron, so they could continue planning their wedding, small though it would be, and then back to the books she was cramming. Hogwarts promised that they would be open the school by the fall, and that any students who had missed a year during the war could come back expecting a full education; but Hermione couldn’t decide if she wanted to go. In truth, she didn’t know if she could face those all too familiar stone walls, or if she would rather just take the exams at the end of the year. She wanted to talk about it with Harry and Ron, see if they’d come any further than her in their own deliberations.

“Anyway,” Pearlie said, setting the stirring spoon down with a satisfied clang. “Are you sure you’re not going to get into any trouble from the magical authorities for modifying our memories, sending us to Australia, and cutting us off from all our connections to our former family and friends?”

This time, Hermione did sigh. 

“No, Mom,” she reassured her, for what felt like the thousandth time. “If you were a witch, I might, because it would be considered coercion. But you’re a Muggle. Non-magical. You’re considered a second class citizen to the Wizengamot. So I won’t even be questioned for it, even if someone did manage to launch a complaint to them. They would consider it protection.”

Her mother nodded, lips tightening. 

“Pass me the cumin,” she said, “it should be in the cupboard behind you.” 

Hermione rooted through the cupboard, shoulders tense. She had the bad sense that she still wouldn’t be getting entirely out of an argument yet, but it seemed so far the disaster was averted. 

“Did you ever think of asking your father or I what we wanted in all of this?” Pearlie asked her, sprinkling the cumin over the soup with tight, furious hand shakes. 

Hermione closed her eyes, resigned. 

Instead of spending an afternoon at the Burrow, it looked like she was going to be arguing with her mother instead. 

“I knew you wouldn’t be willing to back away without a fight,” Hermione admitted. “I knew you’d never agree to leaving the country and hiding. I did it because I know you, Mom,” Hermione opened her eyes, taking in her Mom’s tense form, the hunch of her shoulders. “I knew you’d never agree to it. And I just didn’t want you and Dad to get hurt.”

Pearlie brushed her hands against her apron, sighing. 

“I know, dear,” she murmured, and Hermione felt her own shoulders relax a bit.

Her mother went back to stirring the stew, but slower now, careful gestures. They sat in silence for a couple of minutes, Hermione chopping up carrots for a salad while Pearlie kept adding spices in to the stew, earthy and pungent and peppery; the smell of home.

“I don’t think I ever have had a good look at your wand,” Pearlie said, her back still to Hermione. “Can I see what all the fuss is about?”

Hermione shrugged, slipped the wand out of her sleeve in a casual gesture. 

“Sure,” she said, “But be careful with it.”

She thought she felt a bit of a spark as the wand passed hand to hand, a bite, and she withdrew her hand quickly, brushing at her palm with a frown. 

Her mother turned back towards the stove, casual, and then broke the wand over her knee in one swift, decisive movement.

Sparks shattered across the kitchen, her mother stumbled back from the stove with the force of the explosion.

Hermione half screamed, half yelped, and threw herself towards the wand. 

But it was too late. Her mother had broken it into two splintered pieces and left it lying dead on the kitchen floor. Hermione scrambled towards it, on her knees, holding one end of the wand in each of her clasping hands.

She stared at the pieces in shock, and then stared up at her looming mother. 

“What the hell?” she screamed, blood rushing to her ears, as she stumbled to her feet, “What the bloody hell are you doing?”

Pearlie was staring at Hermione, grim. 

It was a look Hermione knew all too well. 

She suspected she had worn it herself at times. 

“Have your attention now, do I?” Pearlie asked, cold. 

Hermione spluttered, for once wordless. 

Her mother’s eyes were smouldering black.

“You took away everything from me,” she said, more terrible in her quiet rage than if she had been yelling. “You took away my memories of my family. Did you even know my mother died while I was in Australia? Died! And I couldn’t even go to the funeral.”

Hermione felt her bottom lip beginning to tremble. 

Her mother looked away, blinking back tears that she was too proud to shed. 

Her voice was an angry growl when she spoke yet: 

“You made me believe I was British. You stripped me of my identity. You erased me. You erased everything that I was-- everything that I am.”

Tears were beginning to form now in Hermione’s eyes, harsh and prickly. 

“I had to,” Hermione whispered, shaken. “If anyone would have looked into my past-- you and Dad, you’re too unique, too obvious--” her voice trailed out.

Her mother was looking out the window, some emotion other than rage creeping onto her face. She was watching starlings play on the bird feeder, fighting each other for seeds. Silence enveloped them, harsh, uncomfortable. 

Her mother broke it with a voice somewhere half caught between a growl and a whisper.

“I dreamt of Carolyn Maull last night. It was the first time I remembered her since you lifted that damn curse. And Addie Mae Collins. I can’t believe you took them from me.”

Her mother’s knuckles were white as she gripped her apron, her face a mask of grief. 

Tears were leaking down Hermione’s cheeks now. 

“Who were they?” she whispered, reaching out tentatively towards her mother, that proud, smart woman who stood frozen in mourning.

But it was the wrong words to say. 

Her mother’s grief snapped into anger again, her eyes flashing onto Hermione’s. 

“No wonder you did such a cock-up job of your curse,” she hissed, pushing Hermione’s hand away, “You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

And she pushed past Hermione, leaving her standing, alone in the kitchen, holding onto the pieces of her broken wand, one in each hand.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE NOTE: ALL THE CHAPTERS AFTER THIS ONE HAVE BEEN RE-ORDERED as of April 8/2020


	23. Wandlore- mid June 1998

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This Chapter continues the work of the Prologue for Part Two, providing further backstory into Hermione's relationship with her parents, and especially with her mother. The setting is after the Second Voldemort War, in summer of '98.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I re-ordered the chapters on April 8/2020, aka any Chapter 23 you read before April 8 2020 was not the same content at all and you may want to re-read it.

“Your Mom... broke your wand?” Harry’s shock carried even through the telephone. 

“It’s gone,” Hermione groaned, and rubbed her temples. “My Mom has well and truly bollocksed this up.”

Harry was silent on the other end of the phone. 

“Luna had another one made by Ollivander,” he reminded her. 

But Hermione just shook her head in misery. 

“That’s Luna,” she answered shortly. 

They were both silent for a while.

Hermione had gone to Ollivander soon after the dust from the Battle had settled. SHe was jumpy and insecure without her wand, and she hated Bellatrix’s wand with a passion. 

But he had stared at her hands for what felt like hours, studying them and shaking his head. 

“I’m afraid,” he said quietly, his eyes still dark and haunted, “despite all you and your friends have done for me, if I were to make you another wand, it would be far inferior for you.”

Ollivander had sighed, and let go of her hands. Hermione pulled them back towards herself as though burned by Ollivander’s words.

“How? Why?” she blurted out. 

“You, my dear,” he said, “Are a most unusual witch. The magic of your wand has deeply bonded with you, and even now calls out for your touch. Your wand knows of your deep loyalty, and in turn has been loyal to you. You must find your wand again or be stuck with an inferior companion.”

“How is that possible?” Hermione spluttered, ignoring for a while that Ollivander had called the wand a companion. The word had struck a note in her heart, behind her rage; it was exactly the way she thought of the vine-wood wand that had seen her through so many troubles. “Luna hasn’t had this problem!”

The first wand Ollivander had remade had been for Luna. He said it had calmed him to arm the woman who had been held captive with him for so long. 

Ollivander shrugged hopelessly, impressive given that he had gone back to whittling at a long stick of oak, seeming not even conscious of his tools again in his hands. The dagger he carved with flashed silver in the light of the late afternoon sun from the huge windows Ollivander had transfigured in the wall of the Lovegood’s old garden shed. Ollivander wasn’t ready yet to go back to Diagon Alley, and Xenophilius had insisted on taking him in, tending to him until he was ready to return to his own life. As soon as Ollivander could reliably walk again, he had claimed the garden shed in the Lovegood’s yard, started collecting wand woods from their woods and began working at his wands. The shed had gone from a dingy, dusty space to one with floor to ceiling windows on the South facing side.

Hermione didn’t blame him for wanting to be surrounded by light after being held captive in a basement for so long. 

“Your wand had a dragon heartstring at its core,” Ollivander continued, squinting at the wand that was slowly taking shape under his practiced gestures. “Imagine the ferocious love a dragon has for its young, how it protects them at any cost. Your wand knows your heart has this same devoted love, and won’t accept any other wand claiming you.”

Hermione had known, deep down that there was truth in these words even as Ollivander said them. The words resonated in her gut, in her longing as she remembered her wand. 

“But what if it is impossible to find?” she groaned, leaning forward against the workshop table and plunging her face into her hands. 

Ollivander looked up from the oak wood he was whittling, raising a bushy eyebrow at her. 

Hermione shivered. 

Starvation and hardship had made his face almost skeletal. Now that he was slowly regaining his strength, the harsh lines deeply etched into his face and the haunted look in his eye only made him even more uncanny.

“You’ve accomplished many things that were supposed to be impossible,” he said bluntly. “Your wand would hardly expect any less effort from you to reconnect with it.”

“You talk about wands as though they’re alive.”

“Alive?” Ollivander leaned back against the tall back of his stool, setting his calloused hands against the rough wood of the worktable, and frowned at Hermione. “They aren’t exactly alive.”

Hermione breathed out in exasperation, blowing spare tendrils of hair out of her eyes. 

“You know what I mean,” she said crossly. “You talk like they make conscious choices.”

“Ahh, Miss Granger,” Ollivander sighed, leaning across the table to peer at her like a sitting vulture. “Surely you are a woman who appreciates precision?”

Hermione waved her hand, irritable at the man’s theatrics. She wanted a simple question answered: could she get another wand, if finding hers proved, in fact, impossible?

Without an active war on, she could hardly just go around wrestling people into submission, trying to win herself a new one. That was the sort of thing that could land her in jail, co-saviour of the wizarding world or not.

“The elements of wands come from living creatures, Miss Granger,” Ollivander reminded her. “And the wands themselves become imbued with the power of the caster.” He nodded at the ugly blackthorn wand that Hermione had stored with distaste in a holster on her wrist. His nose wrinkled. “You have surely noticed that about the wand you carry.”

Hermione nodded shortly, shifting her sleeve over the wand irritably. She didn’t even like to look at the wretched thing. 

“Wands are powerful magical objects, and as much as they may be accused of being fickle, given that they will align with the power of one who has overcome them, think of that as merely a form of self-preservation. With the one who stole your wand dead and gone, your wand has cast its claim on you again. I can see it. There is no other wand that will suit your hand as well.”

Hermione thought now of this conversation as tears filled her eyes, cradling the phone against her until it cut almost painfully into her ear. It had taken a month of fruitless searching, of harassing Draco and then Narcissa and finally even visiting Lucius in prison before she had managed to wheedle out a story from them of where the wands stolen by the Snatchers had been stored. After all that, to have the wand she had reunited with broken by her mother struck Hermione as an almost unthinkable cruelty.

“Why did your Mom do it?” Harry was asking her. 

Hermione bit at her lip and wiped her eyes furiously. 

“She knew snapping a wand was a punishment for breaking wizarding law, but she didn’t realize how serious a punishment it is. She didn’t realize that snapping my wand could ... permanently disable me.”

That had been the screaming fight that they had wrought after the incident had time to settle in. 

Each had accused the other of recklessly ignoring the wishes and insight of the other, until they had reached a brittle stalemate, leaving each other to brood about their choices. 

The silence over the phone was tense. 

“I’m coming to get you,” Harry said firmly. “I’m bringing you back to Luna’s. Surely there’s something more Ollivander can do.”

Hermione sighed, setting the phone down. 

She routed her Dad out of the garage where he had been sorting through his old dentistry textbooks, a puzzled look on his face as he flipped through them, and told him that she was going out and would be back for supper. 

She didn’t want to face her Mom yet. 

***

In the end, it was Luna and not Ollivander who proved critical in pointing Hermione’s direction forward. 

The two witches sat with Ollivander and questioned him; but Luna’s meandering questions had pried the full truth out of Hermione, the story of how she had Obliviated her parents without their consent, and how Hermione’s mother had broken her wand in retaliation. \

Ollivander frowned, listening to Hermione’s recitation, hearing the guilt in her voice as Hermione dropped her eyes and admitted she hadn’t even told her parents that there was a war going on, much less paused to consider their opinions on how to respond to the war she had been caught up in.

“I see,” Ollivander nodded as Hermione completed her tale. His eyes gleamed eerily, the silver of his magic shining through his irises again. Half-sunken still from his captivity, his returning strength of magic made him eerily incongruent. 

“Let me see you hand,” he requested imperiously, and Hermione allowed him to study her palm with trepidation. 

He studied it intently, gazing at the lines of her palm and running his rough fingertips up and down them, until at last he nodded, and withdrew.Hermione curled her hand into a fist surreptitiously, covering it with her other hand. 

She did not like being studied like she was a curious object to be examined and prodded until she gave up her secrets. 

“Once again, Miss Granger, you prove to be a challenge for an old wand maker like me.”

“How so?” Hermione asked, her heart in her throat. 

Could one damn thing in her life not just be simple?

“You agree with your mother’s judgement of you,” Ollivander concluded, leaning back against his stool, triumphant in his judgement of her.

Hermione glared at him. 

“And what about another wand?” she asked pointedly. 

But Ollivander only waved his hand in the air carelessly. 

“Another wand will find you,” he answered, “But only once you and your mother make peace with one another.”

Luna led her away from the shed before Hermione set it on fire. 

Hermione reflected darkly that if anyone would have asked her about the fire she could feel flickering at her fingertips, ready to be called down, she could have said that the fire was due to accidental magic, an entirely fixable problem, if only she had a wand to channel her magical energy through.

***

Hermione did not go home in time for supper after all, but slipped in resentfully rather closer to midnight. 

But her mother was still awake, sitting staring wordlessly out the darkened window. 

Hermione paused at the door, feeling suddenly young again, caught red-handed sneaking in late as she took off her shoes and eased into her slippers. 

“Mom,” she said gruffly, finally meeting Pearlie’s eyes. 

“Hermione,” Pearlie sighed, flicking her gaze at Hermione and then returned to gazing sightlessly out the window. 

Hermione sighed in defeat and sat down beside her.

Neither looked at each other. 

“I’ve been thinking,” Pearlie said gruffly. “Without having renewed my license last year I can’t be reinstated to practice medicine again until I can prove to the medical board that I’m ready.”

Hermione nodded. 

Their cover story was that Pearlie had accidentally let her license lapse after suffering a stroke. That story also covered the gaps in her memory that were still only slowly recovering, and answered why she hadn’t spoken to her extended family during the year. But Pearlie’s failure to renew her license while she was obliviated had wreaked far-reaching consequences:

“The board is going to be a pain in my ass until I can prove I’m competent again.”

Hermione shifted uneasily. 

She knew she had made her parents life difficult in doing what she had, but it hurt to be reminded exactly how difficult. 

“And you’re getting married this fall,” Pearlie went on, studying Hermione’s face now with an unreadable expression. 

Pearlie had been clear that she thought Hermione was too young to be married, but had acknowledged that Hermione was old enough to know her own mind and her own choices. She had counselled patience; but Hermione was so tired. She just wanted the simplicity of knowing that the man she had walked through hell with for the last seven years would stay by her side for whatever the future brought. 

And being what they had been through? 

It was unthinkable to her that she could be with any other. 

“This is the last summer we have together, my daughter,” Pearlie concluded, looking out the window again. 

Hermione realized with a start that her mother’s eyes were filled with tears. 

“I told you you don’t know me,” Pearlie continued gruffly, her knuckles white as she held onto her tea cup with both hands, “But that’s as much my fault as yours. I should have never sent you to that damn boarding school. I shouldn’t have been so distracted by your father’s troubles--” Pearlie cut herself off, blinking the tears away. 

Hermione was mute. 

She had never seen her mother cry. 

Not even when her Dad had been in the worst of his dissociative fugues, when he had been on the edge of being committed to the hospital, but Pearlie had insisted that she stay with him instead, to protect his dentistry license. Even that horrible Christmas holiday her sixth year, when her Dad had been so out of his mind that her Mother had sent her to the Weasleys, she hadn’t seen Pearlie cry. 

“Mom,” she protested, reaching towards her mother's hand. “Don’t, please,” she cleared her throat. “You have been an amazing mother,” she said ferociously. “It was me that didn’t tell you everything that was going on. I was the one who hid so much--”

“And I was the one who didn’t push you, even though I knew there was more going on than what you admitted to. I thought it was typical prejudice and discrimination, but I of all people should have known to look harder to find out exactly what kind of danger you were in-”

“You couldn’t have done anything to stop it,” Hermione protested, tears streaming down her cheeks now. “I couldn’t put you in the path of danger when you couldn’t have protected yourself, much less me.”

“I would have bloody well tried,” Pearlie hissed, her jaw set in determination. She looked at Hermione now, really looked, deep into her eyes in a way that Hermione hadn’t realized she had been longing for since she had obliviated both her parents. Pearlie held Hermione’s face in both her hands, locking her with her gaze. 

“My dear, you are my only, my precious daughter.”

The tears were flowing down both their cheeks. Pearlie ran her thunbs across Hermione’s cheeks, wiping the tears away.

“We may not have had as much time together as I wanted during your childhood. But I’ll be damned if I don’t take advantage of the time we have now.”

Hermione sniffled, wiping at her nose with her sleeve as her mother released her. 

Pearlie passed her a tissue with a raised eyebrow. 

Hermione shrugged. 

Nearly nine months in a tent had not left her picky about issues of personal hygiene. But she took the tissue and blew her nose. 

“We should take this summer and visit my family,” Pearlie said. “You should get to know the country where I grew up better.”

She returned to sipping her tea, her face grave. 

“We have time yet to get to know each other.”

And Hermione, impulsively, leaned across her chair and set her head on her mother’s chest, letting herself embrace her mother like a child.

“I’d like that,” she admitted in a small voice, something old and raw breaking in her chest. “I’d like that alot.”


	24. Heritage (Late June 1998)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This Chapter continues the work of the Prologue for Part Two, providing further backstory into Hermione's relationship with her parents, and especially with her mother. The setting is after the Second Voldemort War, in summer of '98.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to my wonderful reader's feedback, I have reordered the chapters. I decided it was too confusing to insert this back story about Hermione's past into a series of flashbacks, as I'd originally intended. Sorry for any confusion.  
> Hey, what can I say, this is normally what editors would help me decide...

Hermione and Pearlie stood before the stained glass window, gazing at the sorrowful Christ on the cross. His right arm pushed away a dark cloud: his left hand was stretched out towards them in benediction. 

Hermione shifted in her heels. 

Her mother had insisted she wear a dress to church. She was hot and sweaty and itchy in her leotards, unused to Alabama’s sticky heat; but her mother had insisted that bare legs would not do in church. But now at the church itself, Hermione found that her mother’s morals had remained firmly in the 1960s when she had last attended regularly; Hermione saw plenty of women her age with bare legs, although she did concede her mother’s point that most of them wore dresses. 

Pearlie, Hermione, and three of her most gossipy aunts had been there for hours now, shaking hands and smiling and joking far past the time when Hermione was ready to leave. Two of her aunts were in the choir, and Hermione suspected that they were among the last to leave the chatting congregationalists every Sunday.

Growing up, Hermione’s experiences with church had been mostly through her mother. They lived in an affluent neighbourhood in Hampstead and they went to a Methodist church when her mother didn’t have to work. Her parent’s marriage seemed to survive on mutual understanding, and one of those understandings was that her father needed a day of rest to be restful. Hermione knew her favourite time spent with her Dad were those Sundays where the two of them would cook pancakes together and watch television in their jim-jams until noon while her mother worked at the hospital. Her Dad would hum off-tune as he cooked the pancakes, and Hermione soaked in these little unguarded moments of his attention.

On those Sundays when her Mother didn’t have to work, she dragged Hermione to church with her. Church with her mother in England was stiff, formal, demure. Hermione had spent most of her Sundays sitting by her mother’s side staring up at the vaulted ceilings day dreaming about the adventure stories she read, surrounded by empty pews. She had begged her mother to leave her at home with her Dad, but her Mom always refused. At least, Pearlie didn’t mind whether or not she stood to sing, and so Hermione had allowed herself to drift in a daydream throughout the service. But the 16th street Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, allowed her no such passive indulgence. 

The preacher was fiery, talking about responsibility to their community, about poverty and the impact of HIV/AIDS both in the community and overseas; the congregation was engaged and called out answers to his comments. 

And the singing was thick, joyous, accompanied by a great organ, a call and response style that got deep into the bones. People stood, they waved their hands, they nodded and clapped to the beat. 

Hermione wondered at how much her mother had missed it all, if she had longed for her sisters and her community living in a world so drained of colour as Hampstead in the UK. 

She stared at the Black Jesus in the stained glass window, jumping a little as her Aunt Carolyn walked behind her and her mother. 

Hermione caught herself as she half turned to keep the woman in the corner of her eye. War had left her distrustful of anyone standing at her back.

“Don’t worry my dear girl, we old ladies will be ready to leave soon,” her Aunt teased her, “But I see you’ve found solace with our most precious Jesus,” her Aunt nodded at the window.

Hermione smiled politely. 

She did believe in a God of sorts, but Hermione would not have necessarily called herself Christian. She had felt as a child that it was impossible to know the exact will of an all-powerful being, to be sure of the image or form such a being might take. 

She had felt, often, the presence of something greater than herself, a presence which had kept her grim determination afloat on those cold nights in the tent with Harry when hungry and tired she had been tempted to despair. But she had always felt it was arrogance of her to confine this great Oneness to a name or a creed that could only confine the vastness she had felt. She could not honestly pin down the Eternal into a theology or belief system which she saw from a historical perspective could be as fickle and as passing as so much dust in the wind. 

But neither did she deny that others had the right to their beliefs, and so she merely smiled at her Aunt, not sure how to support her without betraying her own beliefs. 

Her mother saved her from trying to find the right words.

“He has a Welsh connection, you know,” Pearlie smiled, touching the window reverently. 

Aunt Carolyn burst into laughter. 

“Jesus?” she asked, her eyes twinkling. 

But Pearlie rolled her eyes. 

“You know what I mean,” she said reprovingly, and the normally jovial Carolyn sobered suddenly, nodding.

“You know the history, of course Hermione?”

Hermione tried not to squirm and feel like a child called on in class.

“I know of the bombing, of course,” she answered her Aunt’s questions. She had been shocked to find out who Carolyn Maull and Ada Mae Collins were, and then devastated that she hadn’t immediately made the connection of the names to the trauma that she knew had lurked in her mother’s history. Now the names, the facts were drilled into her head. September 16, 1963. 15 sticks of dynamite set with a timer on the East side of the 16th Street Church in Birmingham Alabama, went off. Twenty two injured. Four girls preparing for church choir, dead. But the facts and dates suddenly seemed dwarfed as she stood in the lobby where the bombing had taken place, standing under the outstretched arms of a suffering Jesus:. “But I can’t imagine what it was like to actually live through it.”

“We didn’t used to come to this church,” Pearlie said quietly. “We weren’t here in this building that morning. But everyone in the city heard the explosion.”

“We all came to see what had happened,” Aunt Carolyn agreed, her eyes focused on a site far away. 

“And that was when I learned two of my friends from school had died,” Pearlie added, her grip tight on Hermione’s arm.

“There was rioting on the streets by noon.”

“Terrible days those were.”

The women stood quiet, looking at the windows. 

“All the windows were blown out of this church by the blast,” Pearlie’s voice had recovered enough to continue the story. “All but one; the stained glass of Jesus leading little children to him.”

The sisters shook their heads in amazement. 

“And this window,” Hermione said, nodding to the Black Jesus that looked down on them. Her voice was too matter of fact, she knew it, too school-teacherly and factual, but she couldn’t stand the tension any more. 

She had always covered herself with facts as a shield when her emotions wavered. “This window has a connection to Wales?”

“Indeed,” Aunt Carolyn nodded, composing herself. “A newspaper in Wales raised the funds. They would only accept 50 cents-- well you know, there they called it half a crown-- as a maximum donation. That way we knew that many people came together to give us this window.”

“It was almost sacrilegious back then, having an image of a Black Jesus,” Pearlie added, a smile growing faintly on her lips. 

“Times sure have changed,” Aunt Carolyn nodded in agreement. “And of course, Hermione, you know that this is where your parents met.”

Hermione nodded. That story, at least, she was more than familiar with. As a child she had been fascinated to hear the story of her parents' love, and had romanticized that it was an almost Romeo and Juliet tale. As she grew old enough to appreciate the complexity of her family history, her mother had told her more and more details about the challenges she and Daniel had experienced as an interracial couple in Alabama in 1969. Her father, an Irish Catholic studying on a scholarship at the University of Alabama had settled in Birmingham. Fresh from the Troubles in Ireland, he had seen an immediate parallel to the difficulties of the civil rights movement in the South. He had crossed lines visible and invisible when he showed up at the 16th street Church one Sunday to worship with them. 

The Freemans were at first suspicious of interest Daniel had shown in Pearlie, one of the first Black women to be admitted to the University of Alabama’s medical program in 1969*. But they were won over when they heard how Daniel walked Pearlie to all her classes at the only recently desegregated medical school. Times were so tense in the South that she was grateful for it. The atmosphere of visceral scorn towards Pearlie from teachers and students alike was so thick that when Pearlie got pregnant, after a shotgun wedding between her and Daniel, she had miscarried at 12 weeks from the stress of it all. 

It was only recently that Pearlie had confided to Hermione that the miscarriage had been a fork in the road for the couple. Her mother admitted to her that the miscarriage made her seriously question whether or not is was worth it to keep fighting the breakneck racism of the South. The couple had agreed to complete their medical education in Britain, hoping that Pearlie would find more opportunities there. But she had left her family and her home in her quest for peace after the miscarriage. She and Daniel wouldn’t have Hermione until almost ten years later.

“It’s a shame your husband can’t be here,” Aunt Carolyn said pointedly, but Pearlie just shook her head. 

“This time is for Hermione and I.” She said firmly, as they began to walk down the stairs out the door to Carolyn’s car.. “Besides, he’s still recovering.”

“Mmmhmmm,” Aunt Carolyn murmurred, shooting Pearlie with a razor sharp look. “Well, I do hope you two are getting along better.”

“We are,” Pearlie assured her shortly, and closed the car door behind her firmly. “It’s Hermione and my last chance to reconnect before she starts her own family. We need this time, Carolyn.”

Aunt Carolyn studied Hermione in the rear view mirror as she drove, her eyes darting back to check Hermione’s expression uncomfortably often. 

“Family sure is important,” she agreed mildly, but Hermione heard it for the scolding it was. 

She sighed. 

“That’s why we’re here, Auntie Carolyn,” she agreed gently. 

Covering up why Pearlie had not been in touch with her family, not even for her mother’s funeral, had been a difficult lie to spin indeed. Hermione had taken the brunt of the fictional fault, although her mother had also shouldered some of the blame. 

The Grangers had decided on this story: that Pearlie and Daniel had been having marital troubles and quietly separated in the spring of 1997. However, the story went that Daniel had needed to be hospitalised for his mental health issues later that spring (an unfortunately true fact in the story, which only strengthened the realism of the overall story). The tale went that Hermione had been angry with her Mother, fearing that Pearlie was abandoning Daniel due to his mental health problems, and had stopped talking with her mother. Therefore, when Daniel had been suddenly unable to get a hold of Pearlie, he had assumed the worst, that Pearlie was intentionally trying to maintain distance from him. Hermione claimed that she had become estranged from her Mom at that point in time because she was so angry at Pearlie for seemingly abandoning Daniel in his hour of need, and had not attempted to contact her mother either. Pearlie had used the same cover story as they had used to cover her sudden disappearance at work: that she had suffered a stroke while vacationing in Australia and been unable to reach out to anyone until she had recovered. It provided a realistic cover story for why none of the Grangers had reached out to Pearlie’s family, but it did not paint Hermione in the best of lights.

As for Daniel’s friends, all too many people were willing to believe that Daniel had spent the year in the loony bin. He was already estranged to his entire family, so at least that particular explanation had not required much embellishment, other than solemn agreements to be in better touch with the friends and colleagues who had been so concerned for him “if ever he ran into anything troubling again.”

The story, while perhaps extreme, left most of the responsibility on Hermione’s lap for why the Grangers hadn’t been reachable even despite the families multiple attempts to track them down when Pearlie’s mother had died. Hermione had offered to play the role of the resentful daughter, and yes, she could see that it was somewhat accurate for her to shoulder the blame for the Granger’s disconnect to Pearlie’s family in the States, but still, Hermione didn’t like lying to her extended family.

***

Pearlie was the youngest of eight children. She had five sisters and one brother, although her brother had passed away in the Vietnam war. With such a large family, Hermione had more cousins than she had ever gotten the chance to really be acquainted with, and she didn’t even remember the names of some of their partners or children. And the whole lot of them had descended in Birmingham for a reunion. 

They were doing an evening barbecue in Aunt Carolyn’s backyard. The family spilled across the lawn, the deck, through all the rooms in the lower levels. Even the front porch was taken over with cousins laughing and joking, lounging on lawn chairs as they ate burgers and drank weak beer from tin cans that the Americans seemed to prefer. The night was filled with laughter and close conversations, and Hermione was doing her best to keep up with the easy banter. Pearlie was showing off a family photo album of Hermione and Daniel to her siblings, reigning like a queen on the deck while Carolyn’s husband Duane cooked up yet more burgers on the grill. 

“A three bedroom house in Hampstead?” Uncle Booker whistled as he passed the photos around, “Girl, we knew all that education would pay off for you!” They teased and ribbed at her Mom, clearly pleased with Pearlie’s successes. 

But as the night drew on, Hermione was feeling overwhelmed. She couldn’t be honest with them about the entirety of her teen years. And she wasn’t used to being around crowds. It made her jumpy and nervous. 

She retreated to the kitchen, sighing as she saw the pile of dishes by the sink. Few people could find fault with her helping out with dishes, and it got her out of the noise. 

She filled up the sink and rolled up her sleeves, set to work. 

Her Uncle Andre came in to the kitchen with his son Jerome and smiled at Hermione. 

“You ok?” he said, reaching into the fridge and passing a box of beer to Jerome. 

“Fine,” Hermione agreed absent-mindedly, her elbows buried in the soapy water. SHe wondered what Ron was doing now. Sleeping, probably, what with the time difference. 

Uncle Andre opened the sliding glass door for Jerome to get back to the deck and waved him off. 

“We’ll come join you guys in a bit. I’m gonna get caught up with my favourite English niece, here,” Andre grinned. 

He sidled up to Hermione and grabbed a dish towel, taking the dishes from her as she set them to dry. 

“There’s a lot of us, I know,” he smiled understandingly at her. “And I haven’t seen you since you and your parents came to visit four years ago.”

The summer before her third year, Hermione and her parents had gone to France to meet up with Aunt Josephine and Uncle Andre and their adult children. The Grangers had then flown back and spent the rest of the summer with Andre and Josephine in New Orleans. Hermione had loved the city, the food, the culture. Uncle Andre and Aunt Josephine had always been her favourite; they would speak snippets of Creole French to Hermione and send her long letters in the post that somehow made their way to Hogwarts. Of all her mother’s siblings, only Josphine and Andre had the money to come and visit them every couple of years. 

“It’s been so long since I’ve seen you all,” Hermione sighed. She hadn’t exactly still been innocent when she had last seen her Uncle Andre. She had been numb and confused by the time spent in a half-catatonic state, petrified by a monstrous animal. Dumbledore had severely downplayed the injury she had sustained, merely telling her parents that Hermione would need to take a special preparation due to exposure to a magical malady that most children did not get. Hermione had followed Dumbledore’s cues and kept the explanation vague, certain that her parents would have pulled her from the school and her friends had they known the extent of the truth. So innocent she hadn’t been: but she had been young enough that she had pushed all those experiences aside to instead focus on the adventures she could have exploring New Orleans.

THe summer spent in New Orleans with her parents and Uncle Andre and Aunt Josephine had been a bright spot in her family life as well, before the long year of trouble that had been her Dad’s descent into severe PTSD. She had hardly spent any time with either of her parents for the two summer afterwards, and her mother, absorbed with her husband’s wellbeing and concerned about exposing Hermione too much to Daniel’s rapidly shifting moods, had been all too agreeable when Hermione had asked to stay with the Weasleys instead. 

“Seems like a wink of the eye to me,” Uncle Andre mused, as he opened up cupboard doors, trying to find where to put the glasses he was drying, “But time passes differently when you’re young.” He turned back from the cupboards to smile fondly at her, his dark eyes warm with kindness. 

“Just look at you! You’re grown now.”

Hermione smiled affectionately. Uncle Andre always had a way of making her feel warm inside.

“About to be married,” she agreed. 

“And what a lucky man he is,” Uncle Andre teased her, reaching out his arm to catch her hand as she set another cup on the drying rack, meaning to gesture elaborately at her frame. 

But he frowned as he saw something on her forearm. 

“Child,” he gasped, turning her hand over and looking at her scar, “What in the world is this?”

She slipped her hand out of his, and pushed her sleeves down hurriedly, trying to cover the monstrous word carved into her skin, but of course it was too late. 

“It’s nothing!” she said defensively, acutely aware that she had no wand to take the memory away from him. 

“Nothing!” Uncle Andre exclaimed, “That doesn’t look like nothing to me.”

He frowned as Hermione began to tremble and back away from him, tears pooling in her eyes. 

“Child,” he said gently, approaching her slowly, like she was a wild animal. His eyes were filled with concern as he set his hand on her shoulder, “Tell your Uncle Andre the truth. What happened?”

And suddenly, Hermione longed, more than anything else in the world to tell him the whole tale, the long war she had been through, the torture she had endured, the years of discrimination and fear and the burning need to always, always prove herself--

She choked out a sob. 

“I can’t!” she cried out stumbling backwards, away from him, “I can’t tell you!”

And she ran wildly away from him, from the suddenly too-quiet kitchen and pushed through her cousins and their children and up the stairs to her room, shutting the door behind her with a click. 

***

Voices sounded. 

Footsteps sounded up the stairs, whispers outside her doorway. 

And then her mother was in her room, settling beside her on the bed, rubbing Hermione’s shaking shoulders. 

She let Hermione sob, soothing her with soft sounds until Hermione stilled. 

“I can’t tell them, Mom,” she sobbed when at last she was able to speak again. “I can’t tell them anything.”

Pearlie gathered Hermione up into her arms, stroking her hair. 

“Maybe you can’t tell them everything,” she said after a while, “But you underestimate us, Hermione Granger, if you think that this is the first act of prejudicial violence this family has experienced.”

Pearlie held Hermione by her shoulders and looked into her eyes fiercely. 

“Our family knows these problems, Hermione,” she said, her Southern drawl coming out stronger now that she was surrounded by her family, “We, of all people, know what it’s like to experience something like this.”

Hermione swallowed the lump in her throat and collapsed on her Mother’s chest. 

“We’ll tell them you experienced some racist violence at school,” Pearlie said. “How much you want to say other than that is up to you.”

Hermione nodded into her Mom’s chest. 

“Yeah,” she muttered, “Yeah, that sounds good.”

Her mother held for a while, until Hermione could wipe away the tears. 

A knock sounded on the door, and Hermione nodded to her Mom. 

Pearlie stood and there were Aunt Josephine and Uncle Andre, standing at the door, concern written on their face. 

Andre sat down on the floor beside Hermione’s bed, and rolled up his sleeves unceremoniously. 

“That,” he said to Hermione, pointing to a white scar on the side of his forearm, “is from a German shepherd police dog.”

Hermione sat up straighter in her bed, her eyes round with shock. 

“You know Hermione that I was there in Selma. You know I marched on Bloody Sunday.”

Hermione nodded mutely. It was a piece of her family history she could never forget. 

“I stood with my brave, beloved church members, with the students and all the other civil rights activists and they beat us, and gassed us, and set police dogs on us.”

Hermione could only swallow and nod. 

“But Hermione,” and here Uncle Andre’s large hands enfolded hers, “I did not stand alone.”

Hermione threw herself into her Uncle’s arms and let him run his large hands over her curls. 

“Now, my girl,” he said gruffly, “Do you want to tell your old Uncle what happened?”

She realized that Aunt Carolyn and Uncle Duane were standing, solemn by her door as well; that little Charmayne was watching Hermione with wide eyes. 

She rolled her sleeve up and let them see the ugly world. 

“My school,” she said gruffly, “Things got pretty bad my last year. There was a group there--” she paused, not knowing how to describe the magnitude of what she had been through in terms they would understand. “Well, basically, they were a terrorist group, but no one called them that.”

“They never do,” Aunt Carolyn murmured in shocked agreement, “They never do.”

“I was attacked and taken to their headquarters with two of my friends,” she whispered, her face white as the memories of the Malfoy Manor threatened to overwhelm her. 

She was vaguely aware she began to shake, but Uncle Andre was sitting next to her, squeezing her shoulders as she began to shudder in earnest. 

“Breathe,” he told her, his thumb tracing up and down her shoulder, “just breathe.” 

She concentrated on slowing her hitching breath. She thought she saw her mother wipe away her tears; Aunt Carolyn held Charmayne tightly, and then sent her downstairs, whispering at her to go fetch her Aunt Ruby.

“There was a woman there,” she managed, “A horrible, horrible woman--” she shook her head, thinking of Bellatrix. 

“She did this to me.” 

She gestured to the scar.

“It looks so fresh,” Uncle Andre frowned, gently touching the scar. 

Hermione hissed and pulled back in pain. 

The scar had burned with pain from the moment Bellatrix had carved the words until the moment she had been killed by Molly. But the scar still ached now, a constant low-grade pain at the back of her mind. The curse made it worse when someone touched it. She worried sometimes that it would hurt until the day she died.

“They think she put some kind of chemical on the blade that’s kept it from healing properly,” she managed. 

“Whoever did this,” Aunt Carolyn interrupted with a frown, “Were they brought to justice?”

“Yes,” Hermione said shortly, thinking of Bellatrix’s death.

The room was cloaked in a heavy silence for a while, interrupted only by the gentle scratch of Andre’s thumb stroking her shoulder.

“Goodness, child,” Aunt Josephine sighed at last. “Your Mother told us you ran into some serious troubles with racism at the boarding school of yours, but I didn’t know it was this bad.”

Aunt Ruby was standing at the door now, crowding next to Carolyn and Duane, holding Charmayne on her hip.

“We should bring this to the Lord in prayer,” Aunt Ruby said. “The whole family. You don’t have to hide this from us, Hermione. You need us to lift you up in prayer for this. You have nothing to be ashamed of. You’ve done nothing wrong.”

For some reason the simple words brought yet more tears to Hermione’s eyes. 

Uncle Andre squeezed her shoulders, looking at her with inquisitive eyes.

She nodded, and let them lead her down stairs, noticing that the living room was significantly less full than it had been. She sat on the sofa squeezed between her Uncle Andre and her Mother, and listened quietly as the family said prayers over her, asking for healing. Aunt Ruby had brought oil, and rubbed it on Hermione’s brow, and then she was released, her cousins coming and hugging her and telling her to stay in touch. 

And there must have been some old family magic in the prayers, because Hermione slept soundly that night, without pain for the first time since Bellatrix had cut her. 


	25. Resistance- July 1998

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More of Hermione's back story.

By morning, her scar was aching again. 

Hermione felt the pain had lessened somehow; but who knew how much was psychological and how much a true physical or magical change? It was impossible for her to tell; she didn’t have the diagnostic spells or a wand to cast them with, even if she had known them. 

What cousins had stayed for the night were slowly trickling out after an informal breakfast of cereal and toast and coffee. She thought they might have hugged her a bit harder than usual, insisting that she stay in touch and telling her firmly to get some kind of internet messaging app called facebook. 

She hugged them awkwardly, trying to remember all their names as she did so. 

At last, it was just her Aunt Carolyn, Uncle Duane, Aunt Josephine and Uncle Andre at the house. Pearlie sank into her rocking chair after a late lunch and announced that she needed to see her mother’s grave. 

The kitchen stilled at this announcement, the lively atmosphere slowing to sober glances. 

“We’ll come with you, of course,” Aunt Josephine said. But Pearlie shook her head. 

“Hermione and I need some time,” she insisted. 

And so Hermione found herself by her Grandmother’s gravesite with only her mother for company. 

It was a sweltering hot day, made worse by the low clouds, pressing down the humidity on them. It had rained that morning and it felt like even the grass was sweating as Pearlie and Hermione walked through the graveyard. 

The drive to the gravesite had passed row houses of faded brown brick, children running in the streets playing basketball and playing what the Americans called soccer on bare grass fields. The gates around the graveyard had gathered detritus of litter, caught from the wind. The ancient gravestones were crumbling, covered in moss, the names swept near indecipherable by time. Other graves were marked by simple iron crosses, rusted by the rain and eroded in the weather. 

“Careful,” Pearlie said tensely as Hermione cut through the haphazard rows. The weeds stood at knee height, and the ground was uneven and dipped in places. “You’re about to walk on someone’s grave.”

Hermione paled as she realized that the depressions in the earth were unmarked graves and joined her mother back on the narrow roads. 

They came to the back of the cemetery where the newer headstones stood in silent guard, until they stood silently in front of a simple quartz headstone. 

Marian Freeman, nee Smith

Born 1904 Died 1997 

Beloved Wife, Mother and Friend.

They stood before the grave silently, the noise of the city rising harsh around them. 

“She lived through two wars. Through Jim Crow and the civil rights movement. She had eight children and buried a son well before his time.”

Hermione shook her head in amazement. 

“I can’t imagine what she lived through. What it was like to grow up Black in that time.”

Pearlie only nodded.

“Her father was born a slave. My Grandfather. They called him Moses, and that was resistance you know, a claim for freedom they didn’t have yet.”

They stood silently for a while. 

“She would have hated what you did to me. Taking my freedom. My choices.” 

Hermione was dumbstruck. 

She stood, rooted to the earth as a white hot rain of shame ran through her.

“I know, Ma,” she managed, instead of screaming “It’s not the same thing” or “I only was trying to protect you” or “You had no chance against them, they were too powerful” or worse yet, “I know what’s best for you.”

They walked back to the car together in silence, because there was nothing more to say. 

But Hermione knew something more by the end of the day, because she researched everything she ran into that was bigger than her. She would even call being studious her inheritance. After all, it was her Grandmother who had insisted all her seven girls become educated, her Grandmother who had hoped that through cultivating their brilliance her daughters could cut through the harshness of the prejudices that sought to confine them. And so maybe it was a family trait to believe that her knowledge could shield her, too, from a world that routinely tried to cut her into a smaller shape, a shape that felt like a lie to the truth of the vastness she knew inside herself. 

She had walked by so many boulders in the graveyard, small ones, perhaps the size of her head. She had barely noticed the unpolished rocks lying in high weeds. But now she knew what they were, that those scattered stones had been carved by hand by slaves, to mark the place where their loved ones were buried.

***

Aunt Josephine and Uncle Andre lived in a two story double gallery house in Treme, New Orleans. Hermione had always loved their colourful mint green and pink old house, its narrow staircases and high ceilings, the balconies that gave it its name redone in sharp black iron railing. 

The neighbourhood was colourful, close set Creole cottages and shotgun houses painted in lively blues and pinks and greens; the birthplace of jazz and absinthe and American style voodoo. It had enchanted Hermione at 13 years old, and it captured her now. The city bled history and violence and dissent that echoed like the djembes calling out from Congo square every night. 

A hand drum group was practicing there, open to the public and any who wished to join. Men and women in all manner of clothing drummed; ladies with huge hoop earrings and locs and afros mini skirts and pants or sundresses, men shirtless or buttoned up, all drumming to rhythms Hermione thought reminiscent of voodoo ceremonies. 

She went every night, until her mother and Aunt and Uncle tired of accompanying her, waving her off with a laugh to send her out by herself to dance barefoot on the soft grass as the drums sounded. 

Hermione wondered if the rag tag group knew of the magic they were generating through the rituals of gathered bodies and ancient rhythms. Maybe so; because someone had brought candles floating in votives, and these lined their drum circle. It was supposed to call the spirits in, but to Hermione the air seemed to spark with magic, a bright green reminiscent of the  _ avada,  _ and as Hermione danced she felt consumed by something wild, a heart beat that proclaimed death to her enemies. 

But the green sparks under her feet were life too, in that way of all the truly ancient ceremonies; what was a declaration of death other than an affirmation that life would spring up again? And so the sparks cracked under her heels and ate into her feet with the energy of creation itself, in time with the music pulsing in her ears. 

She didn’t think any of the drummers were witches or wizards, and so no one could see the waves of magic that were teased out of her in the ritual of flailing limbs and laughter that sang against the pavestone of the square. 

***

Later, much later, lying in her small twin bed looking at the ceiling above her, she wondered how she could explain any of it to her classmates at Hogwarts. 

They would have thought it a waste of magical energy, that she could be so careless as to pour a little piece of her essence into the square every night. 

But she couldn’t impart it to them, that great cycle she had felt, that great tying of past and present with a promise to the future as she danced and gave her magic where once slaves had poured out their stolen blood. 

It was almost heresy to her, to know that this was a magic that couldn’t be captured in a book, a way of seeing life that could only be experienced in the communal rituals of sweat and dance and drumming.

Perhaps magic, she thought, staring at the ceiling, was not something that was given as a fluke of blood or chance, but something that was created in the consciousness of the collective. And then it became wild, taking on a life of its own, loosed into the world until it took root in the womb of an unsuspecting mother, a revolution waiting to burst forth; and this too, would have been heresy to the supremacists who had tried to destroy her. 

***

Pearlie and Hermione had meant to explore Lac Borgne with Andre and Josephine, but their son Jerome had begged them to come over and help out when his two year old daughter Phylicia fell ill with a fever. Jerome was working the night shift as an x-ray technician at the local hospital and his wife was 8 months pregnant and overwhelmed. And so Hermione listened nervously as the marine attendant explained how to run the motorboat, and tried not to ask too many paranoid sounding questions. 

Lac Borgne wasn’t truly a lake, as over the years erosion had bled away the marshlands and made it into a lagoon. 

Boats trawled for shrimp but smaller recreational anglers fished redfish, bass, and trout in the grass lines, closer to the protected shores. 

But Pearlie and Hermione were not there to fish, or bate alligators into jumping (for that photo perfect opportunity). They were there to stalk the ghost of Jean St. Malo.

An old man with skin so dark it was purple had been watching her dancing in the evenings. He was a thin man, his hands and face a maze of wrinkles, but he walked with a swinging pride. His accent was thick with French, but not a dialect she recognized. 

“Saint Malo likes your dancing,” he told her one evening. 

“Saint Malo?” Hermione asked. “I’ve never heard of him.”

The man grinned widely. 

“You won’t learn about him in any school. He’s the saint the whites don’t know about. The patron saint of runaway slaves.”

And the man told her the story of the maroon who created a settlement for runaway slaves along the swamps and the lowlands of Lake Borgne. 

“His spirit inspires still, and you’re strengthening his cause with your dancing,” he told her. 

Hermione felt gooseflesh rise at this pronouncement. Afterall, she had been feeding raw magic into Congo square every night for a week. Who knew what kind of ritual she had activated unknowingly?

She and Pearlie had learned more about the Saint (never recognized by the Catholic church, but alleged to be a Voodoo Saint) through a walking tour of New Orleans. St Marlo had led the largest known group of maroons in Louisiana, right on the outskirts of New Orleans. The maroons had needed the access to trade goods that the city had offered, but had used the wild impassibility of the swamps, the mosquitos, the alligators and wild hogs and tidal water marshes to protect their settlement. It was said the Choctow supported them, and that they hunted and fished to survive.

It was too amazing, too heady a history for Hermione to leave without further exploration, and so she and her mother rented a boat to navigate all around Lake Borgne, intending to explore different areas every day. 

Honey Island Swamp was their first destination. 

The narrow river sent frissons of amazement down Hermione’s spine The river got narrow and bendier the further upstream they went, water so murky it was almost green. Cypress trees hung thick with Spanish moss. Alligators sunned themselves on logs, minks scurried up and down trees, wild hogs rampaged threateningly on the shores. Hermione felt herself pulled back two hundred years, or maybe two thousand; the land was ancient and thrummed with eerie power. It was so dense with vegetation that it was almost dark even in the mid day. The smell was nearly unbearable, methane of rotten eggs, and the mosquitos and horse flies were so persistent Hermione wondered if they would be swollen in the morning.

They passed kayaks and pattoons and fishing boats, tourists mixed in with what were clearly locals seeking sustenance for their families. 

Dusk was approaching, the boats they encountered were thinning out. Hermione had been following an almost magnetic pull throughout the day, entranced by the density of woods, the fecundity of aquatic plant species; invasive water hyacinth blooming with delicate lavender flowers that shocked with a deep violet purple and yellow on the top petal. Each turn of the river brought new wildlife, whether it was the blooming alligator weed with its white buds, the bush palmetto, a characteristic shockingly tropical offset to the eerie cypress and tupelo. 

But Hermione had forgot a crucial element; and as she was beginning to worry about the time and the nearing darkness, not wanting to navigate to the arena by lamplight, she heard the unmistakable sound of the motor giving out. It was all right; she was prepared for this; she had an extra canister of gas, and if things got really desperate, the marina was legally obligated to also supply them with paddles. But as Hermione lifted the gas canister, it slipped wet in her hands and fell into the water, floating away from her. That was what the oars were for and they scrambled to get them out of the metal clasps that attached them to the hulls. By the time Hermione had the paddle in her hands, reaching uselessly towards the canister, a sickening rainbow sheen of gas was spreading out on the water. Pearlie was shouting strangled encouragement, the boat was rocking as she moved to help. Hermione managed to awkwardly push-pull the canister along the water until it floated to the side of the boat, where she fumbled to bring it in. It was half-empty and she was worried it had been contaminated with the brackish water. 

Pearlie swore and Hermione fretted, but there were no obvious solutions: they had whistles to attempt to signify their distress and call for help, but who would come by? The sun was sinking towards dusk on the horizon.

They floated for a while as Hermione panicked. 

Pearlie tried the whistle, but it seemed a lost cause; the once busy waterway had quieted for the evening. A fog was rising as the evening cooled, further worrying Hermione about the likelihood of their rescue. The fog could get so thick that it would be impossible to see several feet in front of them, although that was unusual in the dead heat of summer, she was already not confident of her boating skills. Hermione felt panic begin to claw at her chest. Gooseflesh was rising on her skin, her mother had brought them both sweatshirts which they pulled on. Hermione set about lighting the all around light that shone from the stern and the red and green lights for the side of the boat, and covered and uncovered the light in the three short- three long- three short pattern of the universal SOS.

They lit the first of their orange smoke flares and watched as the smoke mixed with the fog. 

A light broke out of the fog in front of them; a boat approached them slowly. 

They were drifting towards the boat, as it approached them silent in the fog. It was a rectangular houseboat, small and with peeling white paint. The hackles rose on the back of Hermione’s neck as they passed through strong wards as they approached.

A Black woman came out of the boat and waved at them from the narrow porch. She was pulling their boat towards her with a subtle magic, Hermione realized, wandless and wordless. 

The woman brandished a rope. 

“Catch on!” she called, tossing them the rope and the rest of the distance between them was closed with elbow grease, until they floated within several feet of each other. 

“Good evening,” she greeted them once they had secured their boat to hers, “You all right?”

The woman had grey hair that was thick in locs that fell to her waist. She wore simple clothing, loose pants and a long sleeve shirt with panther eyes screen printed across the bust. They explained the problem but the woman only nodded. She was studying them both with a practiced eye. 

“I’ve been waiting for you,” she smiled at them, her eyes resting first on Pearlie, then on Hermione. “I felt your daughter’s sacrifice from here.”

She smiled at them, her teeth gleaming white in the night.

“Come on board,” she said, and Hermione and Perlie exchanged a weighted look. 

Well.

She was offering hospitality to two travellers in need. All customs Hermione knew of stated it was the worst of magical luck to cause them harm while they were under her roof and by her invitation.

“Thank you,” Hermione said, and they stepped on to her dock. 

***

Her name was Marie and she fed them catfish, shrimp and cattail roots as she listened to their story.

Pearlie looked increasingly horrified as Hermione explained the war she had lived through and the role she had played. She realized as the night fell, that she had never told her mother the whole story, but now it seemed to leak out of her very pores, out into the thick dark night. 

She didn’t feel that she was under any magical compulsion, but something about Marie itself made it deeply uncomfortable for Hermione to hold the wretched story in any longer. She finished with the explanation of how Pearlie had broken her wand, and the trip the two of them had made to America to visit Pearlie’s family, how they had visited the graveyard, the dancing Hermione had done, and now the trip up the Honey Swamp. 

“Let me see your arm,” she said to Hermione gruffly as Hermione finished the story. 

Hermione hesitated but slowly pushed up her loose cotton sleeves so Marie could inspect the scar. 

Furrows creased in her brow as she examined it with a sharp eye. 

“Bad magic, that,” she growled, tracing the words with a surprisingly delicate finger. 

She began to sing in Creole, an old song that Hermione could only catch half the words of, as she ran her fingers along the scar.

Smoke rose from the scar, black and putrid. Pearlie began to cough, but Marie kept singing as the smoke rose. It seemed to be fighting against Marie, trying to take the shape of a monstrous hand, with claws that sought Marie’s throat. She stared at the smoke with a focused eye, singing until the hand all at once detached from Hermione’s skin, rising up out of the arm.

“Out, out, you foul thing! va!” Marie hissed, opening the door and shooing the smoke out the door. 

She turned back to Pearlie and Hermione and smiled a vicious smile, brushing her hands off in a gesture Hermione wasn’t certain if it was ritualistic or just a habit.

Hermione was gaping. 

“The Healers told me the curse would never go away,” she gasped. 

“It will still be scarred,” Marie answered, “But at least it won’t hurt you anymore.”

She settled back into her folding chair with a satisfied smile. 

“How?” Hermione asked. “I had the best Healers in Britain look at it!”

Marie shook her head, sniffing. 

“Our people have been dealing with curses for hundreds of years,” she said. “At least some of us still remember how to heal them.”

Hermione gaped in amazement. 

“They teach that here?”

But Marie snorted in derision. 

“Hardly,” she answered, and did not expand. 

“But you came here to learn more about the history of the place, I think,” she said, gesturing. “Do you have the time to learn from an old woman?”

It was better than Hermione could have imagined. 

She looked at her mother, who only smiled wryly. 

“I know, Hermione,” she said, “But how are we going to get back home? It’s already late.”

“I’ve got bunk beds,” Marie answered. 

“Andre and Josephine will panic if we don’t show up tonight,” Pearlie objected. 

Marie smiled, reached into a cupboard, and passed Pearlie a small black flip phone. 

“No pressure,” she said, but Hermione’s heart leapt when she saw her mother sigh in defeat, reaching towards the cell phone. 

***

It was strange, standing on the stern of a houseboat in a swamp in Louisiana and talking with her Aunt and Uncle over a phone as the cicadas called. The two worlds spun around each other, the ancient and the new, the magical and the mundane. Hermione wondered how it did not all collapse in on itself, fraught with the contradictions and warring objectives as it was. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again... soo much research went into this. I've actually decided I'm going to write a bibliography so people can learn more. Jean St Malo was a real person, and stories about maroons in North America (something previously thought impossible) have slowly become uncovered through historians and archeologists.


	26. Entanglement: July 1998

“Saint Mal was never a wizard,” Marie said, as they sat crowded on her tiny front porch, drinking gin mixed with lemonade. “But some of the maroons that lived in this area might have been at one point.”

“At one point?” Hermione echoed, suspicious immediately. 

The sounds of the swamp thrummed around them, a cacophony of insects and frogs trilling and humming and buzzing as they spoke in the pale boat light.

Marie nodded, reaching out her hand to a bright green luna moth that was fluttering towards the light. It settled on her finger tips uneasily, licking at her fingers with its tiny vestigial mouthparts. Hermione wondered what its purpose was, tasting for food it could never eat again.

“How much do you know of the folklore about magicals who were born into slavery?” Marie asked her.

“Nothing,” Hermione admitted with a grimace. “History wasn’t taught well at school.”

She had tried to look into it. But what she had found had left her so skeptical that she had finally given up on her textbooks, realized that she couldn’t trust the Hogwart’s library in these matters the way she could for spells or pureblood genealogies. 

Marie took a drink on her lemonade, considering Hermione with a long glance. The moth flew off her fingers and out into the night, fading into the dark wildness of the swamp. 

“There’s a story in my circles, where I grew up. That when a slave was born with magic, all the community came together to try and help him or her to escape. Those slaves often became maroons, or free men, or later, escaped to Canada.”

Hermione frowned, intrigued. 

“But in payment for the help escaping, the former slave would do a ritual, a ritual taught all throughout the plantations of Louisiana. They would be brought to water. Kills the scent so the hunting dogs can’t track. And then they’d dance, barefoot, under the moonlight, much like you did in Congo square. And in doing so, they would give their magic back to their community, never to perform magic again.”

Hermione gasped. 

“Then, I could have lost my magic by dancing in Congo square?”

“No,” Marie answered simply, “Not if that wasn’t your intent.” Her eyes settled on Hermione’s, piercing. 

“But what was your intent?” She asked. “I could feel the working from here.”

Hermione was startled. Very few could sense magic from afar, even extremely complex weavings carried out by a circle of accomplished magicians. But perhaps Marie was uniquely attuned to the kind of magic Hermione had unwittingly done; an adept in a practice esoteric enough might be able to suss out a working from afar if it was unique enough, if it was a specialty the master was inclined towards. She hadn’t realize her magic had been so remarkable, being too possessed by the trance of drums, music, dance to consciously deliberate it.

She contemplated the question, running over in her mind again the intoxicating pulse of the drum, the sway of her hips as she had danced, the ecstasy of abandon that had swept over her, that she had surrendered to. 

“Freedom,” she said after a while, “I just kept praying for freedom.”

But even that couldn’t capture the wildness she had felt, the sense of something greater than her small but precious life overtaking her, expressing through her moving feet and lilting hips an energy that was lifeblood and rebellion and protest and curses upon her enemies.

Marie sat back, a satisfied gleam in her eyes. 

“Exactly,” she agreed, “exactly.”

Hermione felt, with a deep certainty, that Marie was speaking to the entirety of Hermione’s experience, and not just the meagre words she had found to describe it.

The three fell silent. The sounds of the tiny creatures around them formed the cross-beat to their exchange as Marie began to speak again:

“Those magical ones who escaped slavery would often come to the swamps to hide. It’s hard to get through a swamp, and so they couldn’t be chased here. And so the swamps became imbued with magic, as so many rituals of sacrifice occurred here. And that magic that passed through the water and back again to the slaves. 

The slaves were supposed to drain the swamps, to clear them, to make way for farmland; but those who escaped here found freedom in the impassibility of the wildness here. And Saint Malo lived with his maroons here, and survived, and defied those that tried to hunt them down. And so surely, some of those that were with him must have been magicals, once. I was told some of them were. But they gave their magic back here, once they found freedom. So that others could escape too. So that the water would carry their sacrifices back to those who weren’t free yet.”

Pearlie and Hermione listened as Marie’s words faded, as the rattling and whirring of insects and amphibians and other creatures of the night rose up in the wake of silence that trailed behind her revelations.

And then, she continued, her voice taking up the melody of her story again: 

“Sometimes the magical sacrifices were distributed evenly to the community: so that the crack of a whip that once would have caused infection and death was bearable for another day. Or so that the scourges of whooping cough and tuberculosis would spare at least some of the community. Nothing obvious; but just a bit of extra luck, the tiniest extra weight on the scale of whether the community would survive or not.”

“But wouldn’t it be easier to help their fellows escape if they kept their magic?” Hermione couldn’t help this skeptical intrusion, this dissonance that sounded too pedantic against the lilt of Marie’s story. But Marie’s words curdled uncomfortably inside of her, a tendril of guilt, whispering: you wouldn’t do it. You wouldn’t give up your magic. 

“Maybe,” Marie shrugged, “But keep in mind there was no one that was going to teach an escaped, Muggle-born slave magic.”

Hermione shook her head in helpless dismay. The absence of her wand by her side was like a phantom pain of a lost limb. She shivered, whispered:

“But maybe they could have used their magic to keep themselves safe. Surely they were at great risk giving up their magic like that! And for so little in return.”

“And maybe some did,” Marie acknowledged, “But I only know of what I was told. But what I’ve learned since is that these rituals weren’t consistent. They were built more on intent and sheer force of will than knowledge; although songs and stories would sometimes hint at the rituals as well, and that’s likely how the spread wherever slaves met each other. But no matter the reason for the differences, not all sacrifices had the same results. I’ve heard it said that sometimes, instead of being equally distributed among the community, magic would instead seek a pregnant woman out, and she would bear a magical child.”

Hermione gaped. The darkness pressed in around her, and she realized all the hair on her body was standing on end. She felt as though she had passed through an electrical storm and come out the other end burned by it. 

“So you mean Muggle borns are the result of sacrificial magic? Because someone else gave their magic away, a child was born with magic who would have otherwise been a Muggle?”

But Marie shrugged, her shoulders bare in the dim moonlight, impervious to the propaganda and the philosophies that had threatened to fetter Hermione all throughout her school years, until the poisonous ideas had exploded into a civil war. That she was unnatural. That her magic was not somehow fundamentally her own.

But Marie refused to place her narrative inside of such easily delineated dichotomies: “Nobody knows for sure exactly what makes one person magical and another not. But among the magical communities of the West coast of Africa, where the practice started, they believed, or at least, one of the many beliefs they had, was that magic could be given away for the protection of others, made distant by time or space.”

Hermione’s mind was racing. She had tried to make up for the lack of any competent history textbooks, talking extensively with anyone who would listen about the history of muggle-borns and reading novels that had been banned from schools by the ministry for being “too bloody” (for showing blood on the wrong hands) or as a “Corrupting force” (for speaking out against the Statute of secrecy). But in reading historical judicial records and speaking with people, she had gathered what was only hinted at between the lines in the official textbooks; wherever wizards from the colonial nations had assisted in the march of colonialism and death across the globe, they had been met with resistance. 

By her fourth year, Hermione had begun to suspect that the Statute of Secrecy itself had been invented as an excuse to further suppress the resistance of witches and wizards to colonial forces. With the Statute firmly in place as the fervour of colonial aspirations increased in Europe, any magic local African or Asian leaders undertook to protect their communities became suddenly villainized. Their magic against the Muggle invaders was declared illegal, and they were cruelly punished for acting in contravention to the statute of secrecy. Witches and wizards protecting their communities from colonial forces weren’t heroes of a resistance movement like Hermione’s banned books said; oh, no. Hermione mostly read about them through histories of their being jailed for their crimes; invariably, for revealing to invading armies and explorers the power of magic. 

They were called savages who were endangering the wizarding community; newspaper articles from those times wrote about how dangerous those wizards of Africa and Asia and the New World were, how they would bring down the wrath of Muggle based violence into wizarding communities for their daring to use magic against the invasions. (Little explanations were given to the Muggle violence that was already being inflicted on the community; but where this violence was acknowledged, the history books claimed, that any suffering the wizards endured was entirely the fault of the violent Muggle communities, and nothing that wizards should concern themselves with. And as for any witches or wizards who chose to stay with their communities, rather than separating themselves into magical enclaves, sequestering themselves and safeguarding only their own skins against the violence and the suffering of the masses “as proper wizards should”, it was heavily implied that they got what they deserved for making such a foolish choice.)

It was perhaps easier to sell fear of Muggles to the European wizarding public than the truth. The truth that if local magicians continued to view themselves as in solidarity with their non-magical peers, they would continue to practice protective magics for their people. And that would make conquering those nations more difficult for the Muggle colonisers that the wizarding elite were working in concert with. (Though the wizarding elite mostly denied it; yet a mysterious amount of gold, fine silks, furs, gems, raw materials seemed to consistently make their way into the coffers of the wizarding elite, the more that Europe invaded the globe).

But selling to the public the danger of Muggles knowing about magic meant that any who practiced it in contravention to the Statute were eschewed as the worst kind of threat to wizards, a threat against the fundamental survival of the wizarding communities. And those enforcing the new laws, Hermione thought, probably slept better at night if they believed they were preventing the destruction of wizarding society from Muggle violence against magicians rather than that in practice, they were part of enforcing the enslavement and subjugation of millions of Muggles.

Witches and Wizards of colonised areas were offered the choice between Scylla and Charbydis: did they want to join the elite of the wizarding world, escaping slavery, colonisation, endless hardships, but abandon their people? Or did they wish to fight against the encroaching forces with their people, and be subjected to imprisonment, death enforced by the statue?

It was the long-held colonisation standard; divide and conquer. And so, as magicians who were willing to separate from their Muggle communities set up increasingly isolated communities, those who stayed behind became outnumbered, unable to sustain a long-term resistance.

Hermione shook her head in amazement. 

The only flaw in this plan of domination was Muggle borns. Muggle borns who would continue to bring the concerns of their communities forward, or who could continue to resist the jaws of power in their communities with illicit magic. Muggle borns, who reminded wizards that perhaps they weren’t quite as separate from the violence they had both enabled and turned a blind eye to as they liked to pretend. 

And so the wizarding world had been brewing a civil war long before Voldemort’s birth. 

“You said this started along the West coast of Africa. Does that mean magicians there sacrificed their magic for their community?”

Marie smiled, leaning back further into her chair, studying Hermione from down her long nose. 

“You don’t miss a thing, do you?” she asked, swirling the lemonade in her glass. She took a long sip, considering her answer. “I believe,” she said slowly, “that is true. From what I’ve understood from the stories passed down to me, magicians would give up their magic as a boon to their people. They couldn’t protect them all. But they could try their best to give them some small tiny piece of luck that might ensure that not everyone would die, thrown overboard into the sea. Or so that a magical one might be born in the midst of the suffering, there to help whoever survived the passage.”

“No wonder they hate Muggle borns so much,” Pearlie said, her voice breaking out harsh in the moonlight, “You are the result of resistence to slavery.”

Hermione thought she heard a hard note of pride in her mother’s voice at this knowledge.

“I’ve never heard of this before,” Hermione said faintly, her voice sotto in the darkness. She watched the way the light of the houseboat flickered off the edges of the black water, wondered at the worlds hidden in its bracken wine, the violence and the abundance that teemed beneath the surface, “How have you learned of all of this?”

“Stories, child, they spread to those who are willing to listen to magic’s pulse.”

They all sat in silence, feeling the heat of the air press in on them. The night continued its whirring and clicking and rattling chorus, soothing and haunting in turn.

Insects of all kinds were attracted to the light on the boat, katydids and aquatic beetles and mayflies. The insects buzzed around them, but most were repelled from their skin by what must have been a charm Marie had put on them. Otherwise they would have been eaten alive by this prosperity of insect life. Nonetheless, Hermione felt something crawling up her shirt, and plucked a beetle out from where it had been climbing the small of her back. 

It was metallic but shone dimly with oily colours under the light of the houseboat. A rainbow scarab, if her potions memory served her correctly. 

Their habitat must be immense, to find her here on a houseboat in a swamp in Louisiana.

Hermione wondered how much of Marie’s stories were oral histories and how much were myths, their origins twisted past their recognizable beginnings. 

She wondered if it was even possible to know where history began and where myth ended when attempting to understand how the threads of the past were dictating the weft of their weave in the present. 

She set the beetle on the floor of the boat and watched as it slid ineffectively into the water, carried out by a misplaced footstep on the slickness of the wood to become the midnight snack of some scavenger of the marsh.

***

Hermione slept fitfully that night, not helped by the press of her mother against her back as they shared the tiny bunk. While the rocking of the boat could have been soothing to some, the constant roiling motion only further spooked her. 

She knew logically that she was safe, away from the war and the constant threat of violence. But she couldn’t shake the bone-deep dread that followed her wherever she went. 

At least with her family in the mundane world, she felt safe. There were too few reminders of the magical world when she was surrounded by the buzz of electricity, the hum of the television or radio playing in the background, the dim but constant violence of traffic noise. She could pretend that she was a world away from the troubles she had known; that the wizarding world did not and could not possibly intersect with her own small corner of Muggle urban life. But being out in nature, close to another witch, reminded Hermione too much of her time on the run with Ron and Harry. Without a wand, it was even worse, and she jumped at the slightest creaks of the boat until at last she fell into a night-mare laden sleep.

Hermione was the first one to rise. She sat out on the small porch and stared into the river, watching the mist rise out of the trees. 

They ate a breakfast of dried cereals together, simple fare that could be stored easily on the small houseboat. 

Marie looked at Hermione over her coffee. 

“You’re in need of a wand,” she said simply. 

Hermione nodded, still weary, looking under her eye lashes at her mother. Pearlie sat drinking her coffee impassively, her eyes dark with a lack of sleep.

Marie studied Hermione and Pearlie. 

“I think you’re both ready,” she said, and to Hermione’s surprise, Pearlie nodded, weary as well. 

Pearlie patted Hermione on her shoulder. 

“It’s time, Hermione,” she said gruffly. 

Hermione felt her eyes fill with tears. Those simple four words marked a wave of relief she didn’t know she could feel. She laid her head down on her mother’s shoulder and let a weary sigh escape her lips. With the heaviness of her mother’s anger finally lifted, she felt inexplicably small. 

Pearlie said nothing, but put her arm around her until Hermione’s tears stopped flowing. 

***

The swamps where slaves had given their magic were perhaps the only place in the world where Hermione could regain hers. 

She felt it, a certainty in her bones, that these swamps held the sacrifices of her ancestors. The certainty she felt when faced with the magnitude of the swamp in daylight was in direct opposition to her doubts the night before. 

In the early morning light, the search for her wand had taken on the solemnity of a sacred quest, and Hermione refused to blaspheme it with doubts of the powers of her ancestors to shape their inheritance into something that could be greater than what they had been given. The mist was thick amongst the trees and the water, obscuring the details of fallen logs or roots that could capture their boat, but Marie was steering them from the stern, her movements confident as she navigated the waters. 

Her mother sat, uncomfortable, in the middle of the canoe; but it was the most balanced place for someone unfamiliar with the rocking transportation to sit. Hermione was at the prow, staring into the mists. And then, Marie began to sing. 

Her words were half-familiar, sending sparks of electric recognition up Hermione’s spine, words to the spirits in Creole, reedy and legato, each note gliding portamento into the next. The canoe glided through the morning mists, the three figures quiet in the silent echoes of Marie’s song until the prow of the canoe hit with a gentle thrum into land. 

Hermione was at the bow of the canoe, and she clambered out carefully, trying not to rock her mother or Marie too badly as she stepped out onto the land. 

But Hermione had underestimated the persistence of the swamp to bar even the most eager supplicant entrance. Her trainers sank deep into the mud of the riverbank, and she struggled forward against the squelching sink ground, stumbling onto her knees into the thicket. She cried out as she caught herself in a mess of sharp vines. Their spikes dug into her hands and arms, and she struggled against it. 

The air was thick with bugs and she felt herself confined by the memory of invisible ropes tangling around her, as she was threatened by a mad woman in the Malfoy’s drawing room--

“Hold still,” Pearlie told her, her voice tense. Her mother’s arms were somehow around her. 

She must have found her way out of the canoe, and she stood beside Hermione’s kneeling figure, clipping at the enormously thick vines that ensnared her with an enormous pair of garden shears.

They flashed bright in Pearlie’s strong hands.

“You’ll get more tangled the more you struggle,” Pearlie lectured her, and Hermione felt her instinctive shuddering soothed by the authority in her mother’s gruff command. 

“Come on,” Pearlie said, and offered Hermione her hand to stand up. 

Hermione reached down on instinct to push the vines away the entangled her before she accepted her mother’s hand up. On instinct, she grabbed the thickest piece of vine and felt a jolt of electricity travel up her arm as her mother pulled her up. She gasped out loud as she stood next to her mother, the mosquitos and biting flies of the swamp swarming them both, drawn to the scent of Hermione’s blood.

She held in her hand a thick piece of vine, perhaps 13 inches long.

She had no doubt she had found her wand wood.

***

They had told Josephine and Andre they would be back in time for a later afternoon meal. 

Bizarrely, Marie told them they were at most about an hour’s boat ride away from the marina they’d come in at. She gave them an extra canister of gas and waved off Hermione and Pearlie’s insistence at recompense, and with greetings exchanged, they parted each other’s company, turning their boat back downstream, towards the city. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dear Lord, this chapter did not write itself. I hope you like it. It was a doozy to write, I have done so much editting on it! Contrary to my usual practice of put it up rough! Still might have to mess with it, but the basic ideas are there...


	27. Dislocations: late July 1998

“Boarding schools!” Pearlie hissed, pacing in the public bathroom of the Theatre Louisiana, murder on her face. “I should have known better than to send you to a goddamned boarding school!”

Hermione was leaning against the hard formica bathroom counter, her face tight as Pearlie paced. Pearlie had stormed out of a performance piece by a local Indigenous theatre group in the middle of the second act. Hermione had frozen as her mother pushed through the close set rows of theatre goers, Pearlie’s face a mask of fury, impervious to the disgruntled shuffling of the audience against her intrusion. Once Hermione found her mind again, she snatched up both their purses to race after Pearlie, the spectators glaring daggers at her awkward departure as she picked her way through the tangle of legs and purses to the aisle to chase her mother.

Somehow, the actors on stage had managed to ignore the distraction, although Hermione thought the attendants had trailed them, only to be thrown off by Pearlie’s stern gaze.

Pearlie had sought the refuge of the ladies’ bathroom, a perennial favourite for private tears and politely managed panic attacks, in Hermione’s experience. But rather than quietly hiding her tears and suffering in genteel semi-private, the isolation of the space seemed to allow her to expand, get bigger; she was now swearing loudly and gesticulating, pacing the confines of the bathroom and ranting about boarding school. No matter how Hermione tried to interrupt her, to quiet her hysterics, she wouldn’t be thrown off her course. If anything, her protesting interjections were only heating her mother up more, adding gasoline to the fire of her mother’s rage.

The washroom door banged open and a herd of white ladies clicked into the vestibule, chattering and laughing; her mother’s breakdown was rapidly mutating from semi-respectable private fury to publicly suspicious spectacle. Seeing Pearlie pacing in front of the mirrors and waving her arms, caught in mid rant, the woman leading the pack came to an abrupt halt, a horrified look on her face.

“Let’s go somewhere else,” she said loudly to the women caught behind her in the bottleneck of the doorway, her face suddenly blank underneath a mask of cosmetics. 

“Why?” one of the ladies in the back asked. “Did someone take a really bad--” 

But the first lady was pushing the group out, in a flurry of hisses and pushes, leaving Hermione alone with her mother. 

Pearlie, oblivious, was still pacing and cursing.

“Mom!” Hermione groaned, again reaching out to calm her, “you're making a scene!”

“If you call this making a scene, girl, you’ve got something coming!” Pearlie spat, turning again on her heel. 

Hermione shut up, crossing her arms against her chest and leaned against the counter in dismay, praying no one else would interrupt their sanctum of identical sink fixtures and hand dryers..

“Well all right then, say what you’re going to say!” Hermione said wearily, gesturing in dismay. The mirror behind her caught her double, and she was watching the whole scene in reverse, seeing all too clearly the figure they were making together, “But just--” she closed her eyes, damning the statue of secrecy and her continued lack of a wand. “Just remember where we are!” 

At these words, Pearlie seemed to collapse, suddenly shrinking. She leaned against the counter, her head in her hands and Hermione realized with shock that she was holding back tears. 

“Mom?” Hermione asked, her voice suddenly wobbly. “What’s brought this up?”

“You heard!” Pearlie cried, turning to face Hermione with tears in her eyes. “You heard what that lady said about boarding schools!”

The taps dripped a sonorous reprimand, but Hermione had no immediate answer.

She bit her lip, considering her answer carefully. 

The play had been about the separation of Native American children from their homes, communities, and cultural ties through boarding schools. The famous quote was that the boarding schools would complete the progress of cultural genocide by assimilation: “By taking the Indian out of the child.”

Hermione reached out tentatively to her mother. She thought she heard applause in the background; surely the play would be over soon, and the bathroom would be flooded by women seeking to gossip and tend to their baser biological functions.

“It’s not the same, Mom,” she objected, touching her Mom’s arm gently. “It’s not.”

Pearlie looked away bitterly, shaking her head. But the mirror caught her pinched expression.

“Oh, I agree,” she said darkly, “wizards would never admit to what they were doing with boarding school. They’d dress it up in prettier language, say that it was to provide safety for families under the supervision of trained professionals to help their children, ease of access to education. They’d never actually admit to those damn schools being what they are.”

Hermione bristled. 

“And what,” she asked, crossing her arms tighter across her chest, turnning away from the mirror and towards her mother, thinking of her beloved friends and her teachers, who she had respected and who had always sought to nurture her intellect, “what are they then?”

Pearlie glared at Hermione, her eyes shimmering. Her words were harsh, gutteral in the sudden silence of the applause:

“Your boarding school is meant to separate Muggles from their culture. To tie them to the wizarding culture instead.”

Hermione shook her head, a headache forming. 

“Mom!” she groaned, rubbing her eyes and leaning back, “Just because I went to boarding schools doesn’t mean I’m disconnected from my cultural roots! And my loyalties!”

Pearlie was shaking her head, her lips pressed tight together. 

“You don’t see it, do you?” she asked, reaching towards Hermione, brushing her hair out of her face. “Think about it, Hermione. Who are your friends now? Who are your closest connections?”

Hermione blanched, shaking her head. 

“No,” she whispered, “That’s just because I made friends at school. Of course I did! That doesn’t mean I’m missing out on my connections to the rest of the world.”

Pearlie laughed bitterly. 

“Oh, is that so. Well then, what kind of job do you plan on getting now that you’ve graduated? What kind of job are you even qualified to get? Or do you want to join the rest of people your age and talent, and go to university? A smart girl like you should have no problems getting in.”

Hermione backed away from Pearlie, her fists clenched. 

Pearlie was glaring at her. 

“It’s, it’s not like that!” Hermione protested weakly. “I love magic. I deserve to be a part of that world as much as anyone else! I deserve to practice what I love.”

“Of course you deserve to be treated as an equal,” Pearlie sighed, waving her hand as if to push this point away. “But you also deserve to keep your place in our world! To fight with us for the things that are important to us! Not to be so taken in by your new home that you forget about the struggles your community is facing.”

“Mom,” Hermione whispered, walking towards her again, “I won’t forget you. I swear I won't. I’ll be there for you and the family, I will.”

Pearlie stared down at the sink, heaving a sigh. 

She smiled a brittle smile at Hermione. 

“This is about more than just me, Hermione,” she said and swept out of the washroom.

***

Hermione could hear her mother’s voice floating up through the patio in the backyard and in through her open window. 

It must be well past midnight, and Hermione had bowed out hours ago, tense and tired from their argument earlier. And found herself unable to sleep, tossing in the small bed in her Aunt’s guest room. As for Pearllie, she was still worrying to Andre and Josephine about boarding schools. 

It was strange. 

Hermione hadn’t lived with her mother for this long since her third year, hadn’t been subjected to her concerns or her rages. Now, in a sweating hot room hand painted with colourful flowers in a foreign city, she could hear every word her mother said, floating up through the window, wide open with a hope for a cross breeze to soothe the sweltering air. 

Hermione sighed and rolled over on the hard mattress as Uncle Andre again tried to reassure Pearlie that she hadn’t made the wrong choice sending Hermione to a “school for the gifted”. 

Should she go down? Join the others in the backyard and wade through the mire of this argument with her mother again?

Or lie like a child, subjected to the opinions of her elders floating up to her, muzzled by the Statute of Secrecy from either clarifying her mother’s points to her Aunt and Uncle or speaking to the heart of Pearlie’s arguments? 

The phone rang, gratingly loud against the soft voices floating up from the darkness and broke through Hermione’s debate, rendering it at least temporarily useless. 

Josephine excused herself from Pearlie and Andre, opened the screen door leading from the patio to go inside to get the phone. With the floor and the walls now separating Hermione from Josephine, her Aunt’s voice was more muffled inside the house than out. 

There was a pause in the conversation on the patio between Pearlie and Andre, and then the door grated open again, Josephine’s voice cutting clear through the night, tense. 

“Pearlie?” she said, “It’s for you. It’s St. Anne’s Hospital”

And with that, Hermione was on her feet and out the door, clutching uselessly at her side for a wand holster that wasn’t there. 

***

They had meant to stay longer, to explore more of the Bayoux, to visit more family and take in history, both personal and distant; but the late night phone call (it was nearly 7AM in England and the morning shift had begun) interrupted all their plans. 

Dad was back in the hospital again. 

It was bad this time. 

He’d taken too many of his antidepressants, drank too much strong liquor. 

He knew better than to mix those two. 

He said it wasn’t an attempt. 

(“It wasn’t”, he insisted to Hermione over the phone. “I’m a dentist. If I was going to do it, I know what medications to take that would do the proper job.”)

He said it was a stupid error, a moment of drunken indiscretion, just wanting the pain to fade for a while. 

Pearlie booked them tickets the night of the phone call, her hand tight on the mouse as she found the next available flight out. 

The flight was exhausting, a cramped affair in the economy section. They barely spoke to one another, each brewing in their own silent misery.

“He wasn’t like this in Australia,” Pearlie muttered wearily to Hermione, gripping her hand too tightly on the cab ride to the hospital. “Do you understand?” Her gaze was piercing, every line in her body taut. “He wasn’t like this then.”

Hermione could only gape in numb stupidity. 

Pearlie broke her gaze, staring out the window at the rain-clogged streets. 

“He wasn’t like this,” she repeated, quieter, though Hermione strained to hear her over the beating of the rain, the squeak of the cab’s wipers, the noise of traffic. They left their flight, and had taken a cab directly to the hospital, left to drag their bags through the sterile halls of the hospital, tracking rainwater behind them on the sticky luggage wheels.

And then Hermione was by her Dad’s bedside, holding his hand, her eyes red with exhaustion, her body crying for the relief of a warm bed, but fuelled and too jittery on caffeine and sleep-deprivation instead: 

“Hermione,” his voice, a whisper. The faint, grateful smile on his lips. His hand, firm and warm in her grip. He always knew how to be a salve to her, even in the most unlikely situations. 

They said nothing for a long while, and then spoke of inconsequential things, the inane easier to bear than this latest relapse of his into the vortex of his mind. Their luggage was piled into the corner of his room, shoved under his bed; there was no space in this room for the necessities of their vacation, and the orderlies glared at them for piling up the room with such frivolties. Pearlie and Hermione sat crammed between the pile of luggage and his bedside, until they began to slump in the kind of exhaustion that couldn’t be overcome by yet more caffeine. 

But as she was taking her leave of him, his words echoed her mothers: 

“I was better when I couldn’t remember,” he said, the smile fading into the deep lines of his face. “The more I remember, the worse it gets.” 

His hand gripped her suddenly, tightly, not letting her withdraw at this confession, not letting her shrink away from this broken admission. 

“Promise me Hermione,” and his eyes, blue and watery, caught hers tightly, “Promise me, you’ll help me forget again.” 

Hermione’s breath caught in her throat. 

“Do you understand?”

Hermione gripped her hand away, wrenching it out from his grasp, looking around. 

But no one was monitoring their conversation for any illicit mentions of the world Hermione had shown her parents, of magics forbidden or merely inadvisable. 

She nodded mutely to her father, not clarifying what she was agreeing to, and stumbled from his room, too weary to argue with his determination on self-annihilation of one form or the other as his go-to solution. 

Ron met her at the hospital and they slipped into an alley behind the hospital’s stinking garbage bins. He took her and Pearlie back to the home in Hampstead by side-along, their luggage gripped tightly in their hands. 


	28. Cycles: early August 1998

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for one brief mention of childhood sexual assault.

Hermione woke with a start in the night. The smell of burning grass clung heavy in her nostrils, and she grimaced, pushing the memories of the Battle of Hogwarts away with stony determination. She drew closer to Ron, in his small lumpy bed of the top floor of the Burrow, willing the scents of ash and flame to abate with the shreds of the nightmare she was pulling away from. 

But a piteous moan rattled the windows of the house, a low groan that penetrated to her core. She was on her feet, Ron’s wand in her hand as firelight flashed across the bedroom walls. 

Ron was lurching awake beside her, bleary eyed and cursing. 

“That damn dragon again,” he moaned, rubbing his eyes. “You gonna get it, Hermione?” he peered at his wand clutched in her fingers, blinking hopefully at her as the dragon roared. 

Her pulse slowed. The floor lurched underneath her, a wave of heat flashing through her skin. Reality reasserted itself again. She was no longer stuck in a battle, fighting dragons and trolls on the charred grounds of what had been her school.

She sighed exaggeratedly and threw a pillow at Ron to cover the trembling in her fingers. 

“Oh all right, you lazy arse,” she said harshly and ignored his sleepy protests, casting a couple more silencing charms around the bedroom so he could sleep again. She kept casting them on the house as she walked down the stairs and out into the yard. It was a hopeless measure by now, surely everyone in the Burrow had been woken by the roaring by then. But as silence reasserted itself, they could be assured that someone was looking after the nighttime grumblings of their unexpected guest. 

When she got to the yard, strong protego charms in place around her, she realized Charlie Weasley had got there first. 

He was crooning reassurances to the disturbed Iron Belly, sitting just outside of the range of its formidable front legs, casting warming charms on its great scaly haunches. 

Hermione put out the fire the dragon had lit in the rose bushes, sighing. She and Ron had planned to take their wedding photographs against the cheerful red blooms later that September. It looked like they would have to settle on the apple orchards instead, now. 

She reinforced the wards Bill and Charlie had put up against dragon fire, pouring magical energy into the keystones that tied the wards into the ley lines. Her heart was still doing funny things, pounding so hard in her chest that her arms shook. She felt the night pressing tighter around her, her muscles aching. The moon was nearly full, she noticed distantly. They wouldn’t have to worry about werewolves tonight, at least. She stifled a giggle. Just one dragon to deal with, and surely that should be easy for her, by now?

“Easy now,” Charlie was saying, gripping her elbow with a firm hand as she began to sway. “That’s more than enough, I should think.”

She sighed and slumped against him, letting Charlie spell her a lawn chair and ease her into it. 

“You know,” he was saying, thrusting a mug of hot cacao he must have conjured from the kitchen, “There are other people here. You don’t have to renew the wards all by yourself.”

Hermione nodded distantly, sipping the cacao. The world had begun to steady beneath her feet again, the hammering of her pulse rushing less loudly in her ears. 

The dragon grunted, a great dissatisfied snort, spraying hot dust across Charlie and Hermione. 

Charlie just waved the dust off them both with a practiced hand, turning back to the dragon and cast some more warming charms at it. 

Hermione inspected the huge beast. He was lying in a pit of dirt he had worn for himself in the Weasley’s backyard. The dragon had blasted and pawed at the earth until it became the consistency of sand, heated by its furious flames into a warm pit for it to rest in. But it was an old beast, and alone, and it couldn’t keep its burrough warm enough on its own, and woke the whole house whenever the nights got too cold. 

It was battered and worn, its ribs nearly visible from beneath its pale scales. The smaller scales along its more tender chest and tail were still oozing with faint blood. Charlie went through enormous quantities of murtlap paste, attempting to soothe the sun burn. 

Albino dragons did not fare well in the wild, and Charlie had told her that hence albinos were usually abandoned by their mothers at birth. It was likely the goblins had managed to procure this one as a hatchling before they began its barbaric pavlovian training in pain and reward. Charlie thought its albinism had been made worse by being kept in the depth of Gringotts for who knew how many years, guarding the vaults of the ancient families. 

“How is he doing?” Hermione asked, uncertain. 

Charlie sighed, shaking his head. 

“He doesn’t have long left,” he answered, steadying the dragon’s great heaving sides with a knowledgeable eye. “He was in such terrible condition when he got here.”

Hermione nodded. The deep slashing wounds from where the chains had cut into the dragon’s skin around all four of its paws and neck were healed now, but the dragon had been infected when he first came batting its great wings, flattening the wheat fields with the power of its downwash in the Weasley's fields.

Charlie had been on leave from the reserve in Romania, and with Luna and Hermione’s help, had managed to soothe the creature into peace until Bill could come in to upgrade the wards for dragon resistance. With the Aurors busy hunting down the last of the death Eaters still intent on causing chaos across the country, and the Ministry stripped to its core functions and in shambles, the Reserve had shrugged, and told Charlie they’d pay him to continue to contain the situation on site. They were even paying Luna a small wage as his assistant. But with Luna still in the midst of a difficult recovery from the loss of her legs, it was Hermione who found herself sitting with Charlie more often than not. Charlie had applied for wages for a secondary assistant, but they were still waiting to hear back from the Reserve.

Hermione felt a responsibility for the dragon she had helped free from Gringotts. Charlie did not think it was coincidence that the dying dragon had found the trio that had freed it, to spend the time in their company in the last days of its life.

The great dragon pawed at the earth, letting one last rumbling, melancholic sigh out, and settled into its dusty rut to sleep again. 

She sat out with Charlie in the silent moonlight until the tension bled out of Hermione, leaving her bleary and ready for sleep. 

***

When Hermione wasn’t tending an ailing dragon, she was sitting in a cramped hospital room with her Dad. 

It had been almost two weeks since his suicide attempt, but still they were refusing to release him. 

Her Dad, in turn, was refusing to participate in any of the mental health programming in protest of his non-release. 

“You’re making it worse for yourself, Dad,” Hermione sighed, as she played checkers with him on a narrow tv stand by his bedside. “If you’d just cooperate with them, they’d let you out sooner.”

But Daniel’s mouth was set in a familiar hard, stubborn line. 

“They can’t make me spill my guts if I don’t want to,” he grumbled, ploughing through her forward line of advancing checkers. “And I hate group therapy.”

Hermione chewed her bottom lip. Her Dad could be purely impossible sometimes. 

“Still, Dad,” she protested weakly, attempting to salvage her checkers offense, “It wouldn’t hurt to talk to somebody about what’s on your mind.”

“I tell them what they need to know, Hermione,” Daniel said firmly, his voice brokering no dissent, as he brought the last of his checkers to the finish line. “They have no right prying around in my head.”

Hermione gulped inadvertently at the wording, but her Dad seemed to notice, sighing and patting her hand with an absent reassurance as he packed the checkers away into the well-worn box. 

“Oh relax,” he said, looking up to meet her eyes with his usual penetrating stare, “I’m not like your mother. I don’t hold a grudge. I don’t like what you did, but I understand it. So that’s not what I’m talking about.”

Hermione smiled weakly, a sick weight tugging at her guts. She looked around the room, but it was still empty; unlike her Dad, his roommates actually went to the mandatory programming. 

Her Dad only knew the half of her intrusions into his mind. 

The obliviation she had performed had been as delicate as she could make it, crafted to cut out memories of he and Pearlie’s unique meeting at the University of Alabama but preserving his memories of courting Pearlie as they attended medical school in Britain together. Hermione had also wiped out all their memories of her, but to do so? She had to perform extensive Legilimency on both her parents. 

She used to practice Legilimency on Lavender and Parvati as they lie sleeping in their shared dorm room in that terrible sixth year of their schooling. The textbooks she had managed to obtain about the practice assured her that this was the safest way to begin learning; that or by inducing the subject of the mind reading into a hypnotic state. But lacking any willing accomplices, she had stuck to practicing reading the minds of her unwitting roommates as they dreamt. 

She had learned far more about Lavender’s ardent cravings for Ron than she had really wanted to. Lavender dreamed of illicit encounters in the Owlery or the astronomy tower, he pounding her back into the cold hard stones of the tower in fits of passionate love making. 

But when she had angrily asked Ron late in her sixth year when they were talking again how far he had been willing to lead Lavender on, he had firmly denied that they’d ever had sex. 

Was what she had seen in Lavender’s dreams real, or only lustful imagination? 

That was the problem with legilimency; the scenes all looked the same to Hermione. 

Perhaps a true master like Snape or Dumbledore could tell the imagined from the real, but practicing illicitly so that she could obliviate her parents in firm secrecy, she hardly felt she could reach out to either of them for guidance. 

What she had found lurking in her father’s mind was far darker than any hormone fuelled sex dream of Lavender’s. 

She had expected the nightmares of tanks crushing the streets of Belfast, the terror of gunfire in the night, the stink of blood as his shaking teenaged hands attempted to staunch bleeding wounds inflicted by the police on his neighbours and friends. She was even not surprised by the mix of heady exhaustion, fear and sinking resignation as he remembered conversations between himself and Pearlie about the violence Hermione had faced at school. Hermione had the sense from his memories that her Dad conceptualized such violence as almost expected, not quite germane but certainly a fact of life, given his own and Pearlie’s experiences of racist violence. 

She had not anticipated the images of a black robed priest, grinning sadistically at her father’s young face, his weeping cock in his too-large hand. 

Was it just a nightmare, or a memory?

She could hardly ask him. 

She had tried to dance around the subject, that summer before she left her parents for the war effort. She would casually bring up stories of priests assaulting children and the reparations the church was paying so that she could gauge his reactions. 

But her father remained stubbornly unreadable. 

“Hmmph,” he had muttered, taking a long swig of coffee and reading the morning paper, “Terrible thing. But don’t paint all Catholics with the same brush, Hermione. Not all priests are like that.”

When she dug into their skulls more thoroughly in mid July, sorting through their memories trying to decide what to keep and what to wipe, she hadn’t found any more clarity. 

He brushed his own nightmares off as the inventions of a sickened mind, and from what she could read of his mind, never told anyone about them. 

But could a mere nightmare be so detailed, so compelling in its brutal clarity?

Hermione had doubts, and no one to share them with. 

“Did you bring me more books?” Daniel asked her, eager as a child. 

Hermione sighed, and reached into her bag, setting the used sci-fi books onto his bed stand.

“Thanks honey,” he sighed, looking them over perfunctorily, “It sure does get boring here.”

She bit her lip to stop herself from saying that it might not be so boring if he actually tried to engage in the programming and let him look over the books instead. 

“Have you thought more about what I asked you?” he asked, his voice too casual as he flipped through the stacks of books. 

Hermione stiffened. 

Her father was referring to his request for her to repeat the violence of obliviation against his mind, to make his childhood into a blank slate upon which he could write whatever lies he wished to tell himself. 

“I don’t know yet,” she answered, instead of yelling at him. 

Because she saw his eyes. How much more shadowed they looked. How his hands had begun to tremble again. How, even in the hospital under the gaze of overbearing nurses and the constant surveillance of doctors, he had lost the weight and the colour he had gained in Australia. 

Her father nodded, feigning disinterest, still shuffling through the books. 

“Just keep thinking about it,” he said, and set the books down to meet her gaze with a feigned smile. 

A squeak of wheels of a nurse bearing a med cart interrupted their tense detente. 

“Mr. Daniel Granger, can you confirm your birth date for me?” the nurse asked him. 

Her Dad groaned, as Hermione took her opportunity to grab her purse and stand to leave. 

“You know those medications don’t ever agree with me,” Daniel protested,warily eyeing the small med cup the nurse held in her manicured hands. 

Hermione interrupted the nurse’s response, leaning to kiss her Dad on his cheek as he tentatively reached towards the medication, a skeptical look on his face. 

“All right, Dad,” she said, “I’ll leave you to this battle.”

He nodded and smiled at her, waiting until she left to begin his diatribe with the nurse. 

***

Ron told her over breakfast the next morning that when the dragon finally died, the Ministry planned to skin its hide, harvest its heart and blood and sell as much as possible of its bones for use in potions and leather. 

Hermione gaped at him as he chewed his eggs noisily, making appreciative noises at his mother as egg yolks dripped down his fingers. 

“What?” she asked, her mouth still hanging open. 

“Of course,” Ron licked at the egg yolk curiously, staring at her. “Didn’t you know that? I thought for sure you would have read that somewhere by now. The Ministry doesn’t have a large tax base like China, and they have a lot of employees to pay. The Department for the Regulation of Magical Creatures makes a lot of money for the ministry through rendering and preparing dead magical creatures for sale.”

“But that’s a huge conflict of interest!” Hermione spluttered, “Imagine the atrocities the department is willing to ignore, if dead magical animals provide a big portion of the Ministry’s budget!” 

Ron blinked at her gathering tears in dismay.

“It’s horrible, of course,” Luna’s light airy voice interrupted whatever idiotic reassurance Ron had been on the verge of giving her, from her place next to Hermione at the breakfast table, “But Ron’s correct. As soon as Charlie registered the dragon and its health status, the department would have been calculating the exact weight in galleons its death would bring in.”

“But what stops the department from getting proactive about things?” Hermione asked faintly. 

Luna’s lips tightened. 

“Right now?” she asked, sipping her tea prosaically, “You, me, and Charlie. The ministry would lose a lot of its problems if we would just go away and let them take care of their little dragon on the loose problem.”

Hermione set down her spoon, her appetite gone. 

“Have some oats,” Luna suggested softly. “No animal parts in that.”

Charlie confirmed her worst suspicions when she helped him obliviate the Muggle neighbours later that afternoon. The dragon had been stealing sheep from their herds. With some careful obliviation, Hermione replaced “Terrifying fire breathing dragon” with “a stray dog killed a couple of the ewes.”

Hermione found the modifying of memories brought sick tendrils of foreboding into her stomach. But Charlie could hardly do it alone, and none of the other Weasleys had any skill in obliviation. God forbid the neighbours end up a catatonic like Lockhart. And Luna couldn’t help them because she at least, was taking her rehabilitation program seriously, and was gone for the rest of the day for further follow up in St. Mungo’s. 

She wondered at the irony that she could so casually obliviate the muggles she didn’t know while she faced sleepless nights about her own father’s request to wipe his mind of the memories that haunted him. 

And as she awoke from another nightmare covered in sweat beside a snoring Ron, she had to wonder-- was forgetting the things that a person dearly wanted to forget really such a bad thing?

***

Her father was released from the hospital on the same day that the dragon was actively dying. 

The dragon writhed in agony, blowing furious flames at the house, the fields. It would scrabble for purchase in the air and then collapse, exhausted into the embrace of the earth again, groaning furious moans like low rumbling thunder. 

Luna had exhausted her magical energy earlier in the day. She found the dragon’s visceral distress troubling and had been forced to retire to her home to tend to her own flagging energy. 

Harry and Ron took care of dampening the fires and repairing the property destruction under Molly’s sharp eye while Charlie, Hermione, and Fleur attempted to soothe the dragon’s pain. Hermione determined to not think about how Fleur, a Gringott’s employee, was so knowledgeable about spells to soothe dragon pain as they tended to the dying Iron Belly.

Arthur and Percy were working back-breaking hours under the struggling Ministry, and could not get off work even to help with containing a dying dragon on the family estate. George had only just begun to open up his shop again, and everyone had rallied around him, encouraging him not to worry about the dragon blowing holes out of his family’s property and concentrate on his work instead.

“How,” Hermione asked, panting and wiping the rolling sweat from her brow as she recovered from a particularly hard to cast pain relieving charm, “Does anyone ever manage to keep a dying dragon a secret?”

She had resorted to simply repelling away any of the Muggle neighbours within 10 km of the Weasley property to feel suddenly compelled to spend a weekend in the city. She could only hope the subtle ever-refreshing charms she’d put on the livestock feed to make up for the loss of all their sheep would hold until they got back.

“Normally a whole weyr of dragons would accompany a dying dragon,” Charlie replied, sitting down heavily on a conjured chair as the iron belly lay, panting in the middle of the Weasley’s barley crop. The animal had rolled on half the crop, and Hermione wondered if the Weasley’s would bother to harvest the remaining barley at all, or just till whatever survived the dragon’s death throws back into the ground. “Their songs comfort the animal.”

“If the wyrms don’t get it first,” Fleur added skeptically, conjuring a large blue beach umbrella to shade them under as they and the dragon caught their breath. 

“Only badly starving wyrms will tear a still living dragon down,” Charlie disagreed mildly, with the air of a man who had long been accustomed to explaining the habits of creatures with teeth as long as Hermione’s arm, “Otherwise they act like typical scavengers, and wait until the dragon is dead to eat it. It’s too dangerous for scavengers to want to tangle with a dragon under normal circumstances. Why would they bother, when they could just wait until nature takes its course?”

Fleur shuddered, a tad theatrically Hermione couldn’t help but think. 

“Gruesome,” she frowned, steadying the Iron Belly as it lay panting. 

“The circle of life,” Charlie shrugged, and swatted at a fly that was trailing his sweat. 

The three of them sat in silence and drank cool lemonade until the dragon began writhing again. 

***

Charlie caught her that night with yew logs in her arms standing in the centre of a rune circle as the full moon rose. 

“I suppose,” he said blandly, as Hermione clutched the ritually cut logs tightly in her arms, “This has absolutely nothing to do with any summoning rituals you might have happened to stumble across in the last couple of days.”

Hermione set the logs down carefully in the centre of the stone circle she had made. It had taken her a long time to cut those logs into even, 12 inch long slices with a hand saw. 

They both knew Charlie had lent her a book about dragons that included the ritual for summoning wyrms. 

“Completely coincidental,” Hermione said as innocently as possible under the circumstances, and stood back from the pile of logs to study Charlie closely. 

His blue striped pajamas shone light in the moonlight. She fingered Ron’s wand in her pocket with trepidation. She did not want anything interfering with her plans-- but Charlie had never been anything other than kind to her. 

Charlie was returning the study, his brow arched sardonically. 

“I suppose this might be coincidence as well,” he said, and reached into a leather pouch that hung around his neck, and retrieved five rowan berries. 

Hermione gasped, and jerked her hand out of her pocket in shame. 

The rowan berries offered protection from wyrms to those who wore them, but they had to bathe in fire salamander blood for five full moons in a row before they would offer anyone protection. Tending to dying dragons had been the last thing that had been on her mind five months ago, and she didn’t dare buy any. It would tip her hand too obviously to the ministry. 

She stood across from Charlie and the two of them began the ritual fire together, walking around it 13 times widdershins, always keeping each other across from one another. 

At the end, Charlie screeched an inhuman call, clicking his teeth and tongue horribly. The sound raised gooseflesh all along Hermione’s arms. 

The ritual was said to be more powerful if one knew the name of a wyrm clan to call on; but Hermione, of course, was not in the position to know of any. Charlie’s ear-splitting call must have been the name of the nearest clan.

The wind blew warm from the East, and Hermione curled her arms around herself, shivering. 

“Does Ron know?” Charlie asked her softly, coming to stand beside her. 

Now that the ritual was complete, they could stand wherever they liked. 

“He wouldn’t get it,” Hermione sighed. Charlie eyed her, frowning, but seemed to accept the statement at face value. But she felt compelled by that frown to expand a little more: “And I didn’t want to get anyone in trouble. So I didn’t tell anyone.”

But neither she nor Charlie were really surprised when they saw Luna in her wheelchair, gliding up over the hill just as she finished saying that.

“I’ll go help,” Charlie reassured her, patting her arm and conjuring a bench for her. “You’ve obviously been busy enough as it is.”

Hermione smiled crookedly and let Charlie go to help float Luna the rest of the way towards them. She deserved the mild reproach, and anyway she was tired from the late nights of meditation the ritual had demanded, on top of helping Charlie and Fleur contain the dragon at the first hint of trouble. 

Luna was struggling with propelling the wheelchair over rough terrain, and seemed grateful as Charlie leant his magic to help propel her the rest of the way to the fire.

“Oh, I see you’re summoning wyrms,” Luna said matter-of-factly as Charlie settled her beside Hermione. “I was so sad to think that the dragon would be used in death by those who cared little for its well-being as much as it was used in its life. And I have always wanted to see a wyrm first hand.”

“Maybe you can come join me in Romania after your seventh year is over,” Charlie offered thoughtfully. 

Luna shrugged. 

“If I’m recovered enough by then,” she said matter-of-factly. 

They fell into silence, perhaps contemplating or studiously not contemplating the various consequences the war had wrought. 

Hermione had still not decided what to do about her father’s request. 

She stared at the hot burning coals and turned the matter over in her mind. 

His release from the hospital had been terrible timing. Her mother had informed her that morning in a brief daily phone call from the Weasley’s shed that he had legally fought for his release and obtained it, because despite that his dissociative fugues had in fact been worsening in the hospital rather than resolving, he had not proved that they caused him to do anything overtly harmful to self or other. Yes, he muttered at sights that no one else could see, and paced a hole in the ward hallways, but without that singular determining piece of harm caused, he was fit to be released under the law. 

Pearlie, well acquainted with the functioning of the mental health system after years of her husband’s illness, had informed Hermione of the update in a too-stable tone that belied her underlying uncertainty. 

But with the dragon actively dying, her illicit ritual prepared, and the entire Weasley clan just barely managing to contain the dragon, Hermione had begged off visiting her parents until at least the next day. 

And maybe, if Hermione was willing to peer into the dark corner of her psyche before she slammed the door, she could admit that part of her hesitation to visit her father newly released from the hospital was due to her completely lacking any idea of what she was going to do about his request to be obliviated again. 

She squirmed in her seat and tried to get comfortable, widening the bench and conjuring herself several blankets so she could lie down. 

***

She awoke to the sound of flapping wings, clicking and chirping calls echoing off the far hills. 

The embers were glowering, the moon was low in the sky. 

“Wyrms,” Luna whispered, enraptured, and rose to a sitting position. 

They circled above the body of the great iron belly, long and lythe and nearly invisible in the dark sky. And then the leader let out a long screeching call and dove to the body with a great flapping of wings. 

The pack descended after it, ripping and tearing the dragon’s flesh with great wet sloshing noises. 

Hermione felt she should have been horrified but only found herself entranced, pulled towards the feeding wyrms as they tore the body of the giant body in front of them into pieces. 

At last, the flesh was completely gone, the young wyrms fighting over the entrails, the giant ribcage of the fallen dragon exposed its great heart. 

The heart glowed with a deep crimson fire of the deepest forge, and the leader of the wyrm clan drew itself to its full height and pulled ahead of the pack, towards where Hermione stood, frozen. 

Charlie’s hand was on her shoulder. 

“Steady,” he whispered, “steady.”

But Hermione could not have looked away from those golden serpentine eyes if her life depended on it. 

Slowly, gracefully, the wyrm lowered its great scaly head, bowing in an exaggerated gesture towards Hermione. 

Hermione stepped forward on trembling legs, a single step. 

The wyrm turned from her, towards the fallen iron belly and tore the glowing heart out of the ribcage with surprisingly delicate teeth, and turned back towards Hermione, the end of its coiled tail flickering like a rattler. 

He bowed his head again, and Hermione felt Luna push her forward.

She stepped towards the snake-like creature, nearly stumbling through the barley field. She thought she could smell the coppery scent of blood under the cloying, skunk-like scent of the wyrms. 

His head was as big as an elephant’s, with powerful jaws that Hermione knew could rip her head off with a single bite. His eyes showed no expression, and she knew that like a bird, it saw best when its head was turned away from her. Still, they hunted by echo-location as well, and it would have no problem with depth perception if it decided to kill her. 

She reached her hands up in supplication to the beast’s mouth and it set the dragonheart into her hands without even touching its teeth on her palms. But before it withdrew from her, its jaws clamped down on the heart as Hermione held it in her hands, and the blood rushed down her hands, flowing in rivulets down her arms, sticky and heavy and still warm. 

Hermione jerked the wet heart towards her breast and stepped away from the wyrm. 

It drew up in front of her, towering above her, raised its head to the setting moon and the rising sun and screeched at the grey dawn, the mists rising in the field behind it. 

Hermione stepped back again, willing herself not to fall, but the wyrm leader turned towards its pack and screeched again, calling them to a frenzy of flight in fluttering wings and flickering tails. 

The embers of the heart bled a last flickering light and guttered out. 

***

She sat down with her Dad in their bright kitchen later that afternoon, after she’d slept and ate a late lunch, slipping away from the Weasley’s with a last consoling hug from Ron. 

She sat across from Daniel at the kitchen table, listening to the sound of a cheery pop song on the radio as her Mom washed dishes at the sink.

“I’ll do it,” she told him, grasping at his hand, desperate for him to understand her, “But I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Her father smiled at her, tears of relief shining in his eyes as he wrapped her in a tight embrace. 

“Thank you,” he whispered gruffly, “thank you.”


	29. Pregnant: August 1998

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hermione's back story continues.

Hermione had a problem with goblins. 

She was frozen out of her Gringott’s vault since she had blown up half the bank flying on the back of the sickened Iron Belly. Though the Wizarading Britain may have forgiven her for her crimes committed during the war, in a blanket amnesty for those who had fought Voldemort’s fascist takeover, the goblins had always adhered to their own legal and moral conduct. 

Harry had been in negotiations with Gringotts since July, and had finally come to a settlement they considered fair; all of the Goblin made goods in the Black or Potter vaults would be returned to them, along with 3/4 of the gold of the Black vault and 1/4 of the Potter vault. 

Ron had gaped at this settlement, but Harry had only shrugged. 

“It wasn’t really mine, anyway,” he said. 

Neither Hermione nor Ron had the kind of money that Harry did to even approach this kind of a settlement. 

But Bill had stepped in to do negotiations for Ron and Hermione. 

“As part of the family, it’s the least I can do,” he had told a worried Hermione one night. She was all too aware of the fact that both she and Ron were currently living off the Weasley’s generosity. She had spent what little savings she had on buying supplies for Harry’s ill advised camping trip and didn’t have a pence to convert, even if she did have access to Gringotts. 

With her marriage to Ron fast approaching, she felt it would be shameful to ask her parents for money for school supplies. 

And so Hermione was extraordinarily grateful for Bill’s intervention, as without it, they would be unable to cash a wizarding paycheque even if either of them had such a thing as a job. 

***

Without a dragon to care for, and her father’s immediate insistence abated until Ollivander could get her a new wand made with the vinewood she had provided him with, Hermione felt like she was rattling aimlessly from one decision to the next. 

Would she like roses or lilies for her wedding bouquet? 

Would she like to go to the school in the fall, or take Shacklebolt up on his offer of employment with the D.M.L.E., training to be an auror?

Would she like her tea plain or with sugar?

The smallest decisions loomed at her, seemingly laden with unknown consequences. She drifted in a fog of uncertainty. 

It was made no better that both Ron and Harry seemed to find the decision to train as an Auror obvious, although Ron at least had a strong financial motivation drawing him in that direction. 

Hermione wondered if Harry had simply never had any time to even consider anything different. 

Ginny had been Flooing to the school every day to volunteer to help with clean up, and Hermione eventually took to following after her in hopes that the work would provide her with some clarity, or at least reprieve from the shroud of oppressive mourning that seemed to have fallen over the Weasley household. 

She was in the kitchens, trying to shirk away from the stares and mutters that seemed to always follow her and studiously ignoring her own burrowing anxiety from being in the castle again. She was picking at a treacle pie when she heard the uncharacteristic sounds of a house elf arguing-- insofar as it could be said house elves argued. 

Hermione pushed her plate away and wandered away from the solicitous bows and questions of the house elves that ringed around her, irritated with them from trying to help her to death and irritated with herself for resenting their anxious smothering inquiries. She followed the sound of a high Elven voice raised in a drunken argument with a human one and stumbled across Minvera McGonagall frowning over a very pregnant Winky. Hermione stopped in her tracks, bemused. She spared a moment to hope that house elf physiology did not react to alcohol the same way a human fetus would, and that Winky wasn’t dooming her child to some kind of disability for life. 

The other Elves seemed to be giving the argument a wide berth, but could not seem to stop casting anxious glances at the pair.

“I want to give birth on my own, Professor,” Winky was saying, her voice high with uncharacteristic determination. She must have taken Dobby’s death even harder then the other elves, who Luna had told her fell into a lax depression after his murder. Visitors to the castle had eaten nothing but oats and bland soup for weeks after the battle, until some odd combination of the increasing crowds in the castle doing repairs and the passage of time had snapped the elves back into their regular sense of duty. 

Still, it was not unusual to run across uncharacteristically neglected areas of the castle, covered in dust and rubble and find an Elf huddled into a corner, sobbing. Dobby had not been the only Elf lost in the battle, only the most notorious. 

Hermione had wondered wryly after finding with a start that the sinks were clogged instead of their usual sparkling clean, if the true reason why the pure blood families would dispense corporal punishment with ease but avoided summary execution was that they couldn’t allow their workforce to be indisposed with grief. 

McGonagall, arguing with Winky, snapped Hermione away from her reflections. 

“I know the Elves are all struggling,” McGonagall protested, her voice worn with care, “But as Headmistress, I am responsible for all the beings of this school. I can’t allow this plan to continue.”

“If you order me not to, I won’t,” Winky countered, “But I’m telling you this is what I want. It’s not your place to tell me what I can and can’t do.”

Hermione drew closer, bemused by this new combative side to Winky’s personality.

McGonagall noticed Hermione hovering and smiled tiredly, pushing a loose lock of hair behind her ear. 

She gestured to Winky’s pregnant form with a roll of her eyes, disgruntled. The gesture invited conspiratorial closeness, collegial irritation that marked Hermione as an equal rather than McGonagall’s subordinate: ‘Do you see what I have to put up with?’

Hermione felt a heat rush to her cheeks and realized with a start it was anger. She would have been flattered once, to be included in McGonagall’s privy. But it reminded her too much of the patriarchal attitudes that had been lambasted in the play about boarding schools that had so set off her mother: I know best and you don’t. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll get in line. (The “or else” was sometimes implied, sometimes explicit and unforgettable.)

“What’s this about?” Hermione asked, a sharp note in her voice. 

McGonagall’s smile faded. No doubt she was suddenly remembering knitted hats. 

Winky wobbled in Hermione’s direction, for once not shrinking back from her. 

“Hermy,” she hiccoughed, “tell the Headmistress I should be able to give birth on my own,” she glared at McGonagall, accentuating each word with a jabbing finger in the Headmistresses direction: “No magical doctors!” She swayed, staring confused at her finger before settling on the floor with a thump. 

Hermione shrugged at McGonagall, furious suddenly at the professor’s lackadaisical attitude, at her inability or unwillingness to take a definitive stand for the school’s safety, for Muggle safety in all the years before, for her half-measures and empty promises.

“Well,” Hermione asked, covering her fury with a simpering smile, “why not?”

Perhaps her smile had been more of a grimace, because McGonagall (sometime in the past ten minutes, or perhaps along the past year, Hermione had left off the “Professor” that usually preceded that name) was now frowning. 

“All house elves get like this when they’re pregnant,” McGonagall sighed, “it’s irrational. They have difficult births. Sometimes Healers or Mediwitches are the only thing between them and death. Everyone knows that a pregnant House Elf will insist on an independent birth and then as soon as she gets into the contractions she crumbles and is hysterical, asking for help.” 

Winky was shaking her head as McGonagall spoke, muttering “I won’t!” in protests interspersed with hiccups. 

McGonagall raised her voice to talk over the racket:

“After all,” McGonagall glared at Winky, “We are on the same side here, Winky. I just want what’s best for you and your child.”

“Well, then,” Hermione answered with a shrug, “Why not just let Winky try? You can have someone on hand if she does end up wanting for help.”

“Scatctly!” Winny slurred, pushing herself up on an elbow from her place on the floor. “Just try. You’ll see I won't give in.”

“Because I have so many mediwitches and Healers on hand to spare in an emergency! Winky,” McGonagall was glaring now at Hermione, “What Hermione doesn’t realize is that if you don’t agree to an induced labour, I can’t promise you a mediwitch at the drop of a hat, like Dumbledore used to do, as much as I wish I could! Poppy is far behind on checking on our injured students this summer.”

“I won’t need one,” Winky protested again. 

“And if you do, you know that you might die because Hogwarts can’t help you?” Hermione pressed. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Winky muttered. 

“Really, you know you could die?” Hermione clarified.

“Death! No one was fussing about my death when I fought at the Battle! Oh, no, you were all willing for my help when the fighting came, no long speeches about does Winky really know what she’s getting into then!”

And Winky snapped her fingers, once, twice, and then finally cracked away, still wobbling.

Hermionie raised her eyebrow at McGonagall.

“Sounds to me like she understands what she’s getting into,” Hermione said. “And I think that the Statute of Health would agree with me that if a patient is informed of the risks and refuses treatment, she can do so without interference.”

“The statute of health hardly applies to House Elves,” McGonagall sighed, crossing her arms, “Even you, Hermione, has to admit that.”

Hermione smiled. 

It had been a while since her fifth year, but her rage then had cemented the legal precedents into her head:

“In fact I think you’ll have a hard time proving that it doesn’t” she answered. “Since Brown V. Regina, aka the Werewolf case proved that all Magical Beings are protected under that law.”

McGonagall threw up her hands in seeming despair. 

“So be it! Elves!” She cried, and immediately she was surrounded by an army of bobbing heads, “Inform Winky that she has her wish, she may give birth alone. Remind her, when the time comes, I may not be able to help her.”

A gaggle of tiny nodding heads, of cracks of apparition and mvoement as they seemed to go to Winky on mass to tell her this.

McGonagall stood for a moment, silent, staring at her hands, and then finally looked up at Hermione with a grief- stricken face. 

“ If she dies, Hermione,” McGonagall said shortly, “This is on your head!”

And she turned on her heel, and stalked away, her face twisted in sorrow. 

The sound of a glass setting down on the counter made her jump.

Hermione found herself looking into the face of Tiberius Ogden, foremost legal scholar. She blushed deeply. 

“I don’t think,” Tiberius mused with a smile behind his heavy grey whiskers, “I’ve ever heard Brown v. Regina applied quite like that.”

Hermione slouched down next to him and took the butterbeer an anxious House Elf pushed into her hands. 

She had been bluffing, of course, but McGonagall didn’t know enough of the law to call her on it. Brown v. Regina hardly proved anything about the rights of magical creatures. It wasn’t even a criminal case, but one where Brown had sued the Wizengamot for compensation after an errant Healer had tried to force his son into drinking the Wolfebane potion. 

Brown’s son had not actually been a werewolf, as Hermione well knew. He was a man with a wolf animagus, but having transformed on the full moon and been arrested, no one believed his protests. He was forced to drink a Wolfe’s Bane potion, and died from it; in addition to the potion being intolerable for humans, Brown Jr. had an allergy to aconite. 

The Healer argued that she had only been doing her duty, trying to protect the Aurors who had jailed him in temporary holdings, awaiting trial for running free as a werewolf rather than being locked inside (as was the law with werewolves). 

(Hermione had lost some of her esteem for Remus Lupin when she realized he and his friends had been all breaking the law by running through the Forbidden Forest during the full moon. Snape’s utter disdain for Lupin made more sense from the perspective of an adult; Remus had not only risked his own life, but the lives of countless others. His friends could have easily been jailed with him for “aiding and abetting.” And Remus Lupin himself had nearly turned Harry, Ron and Hermione into werewolves that fateful night in the shack, once again derlicting his duty to take his condition seriously, forgetting his medication and putting the entire school at risk. Hermione shivered to think that she might have been bitten, if it wouldn’t have been for Snape and Black’s intervention).

“Do you think the wizengamot would accept the argument that Brown v. Regina argues for the rights of magical beings?” Tiberius was asking her, bemused.

“Probably not,” Hermione answered, abashed. But she raised her eyes defiantly to meet Tiberius’s twinkling ones. “Not that that would stop me from arguing it anyway.”

“Indeed, indeed!” Tiberius laughed, kicking his heels on the stool. His short legs didn’t quite reach the floor. “How would you argue it, my dear?”

Hermione considered the question carefully, playing with the glass of her butterbeer. It was one she had spent hours agonizing over when she had first discovered the problems with House Elves working conditions, and learned about the general lack of labour protection or creature rights for what were obviously intelligent and sentient beings.

In Brown v. Regina, the prosecution had argued that even if he had been a werewolf, he should not have been forced to drink it without checking his claims of an allergy. Ultimately, this was not what won the judge over, but it was one of the only caes that even mentioned the rights of magical beings. The judge had dismissed this argument as irrelevant and “outside the scope of the case”, but heavily implied it may have merit as a defense

“I’d cite the treaties between Magical Beings and the Wizengamot from the 1600s, and argue that they implied non-interference with the health of magical beings. If this was rejected, I would argue in alternate that if magical beings are not being accepted as independent, then they should be considered as citizens would I’d cite Brown V Regina, the mugwump’s mention of the rights of magical beings, and how she stated the argument about werewolf rights may indeed have merit under the Statute of Health.”

Tiberius smiled a bemused smile. 

“A thorough answer,” he said, raising his eyebrows, and waved at the House Elves to bring them more biscuits. They did so, with their usual alacrity.

“But I’ve been unconscionably rude, my dear,” Tiberius said, brushing the crumbs off his pants and stretching his arm to Hermione, “I haven’t even introduced myself. I’m Tiberius Ogden.”

Of course, Hermione already recognized the famous mugwump. 

“Hermione Granger,” she said, and shook his hand, “It’s a pleasure to meet you, sir. I’ve been fascinated by your work with judicial reform.”

Tiberius snorted.

“My utter failure to accomplish any meaningful reform over the past seventy years despite having one of the highest positions in the lands, you mean?” he said, shaking his head. Lines seemed to crease his brow all at once, and Hermione realized with a start that under his cheerful demeanor, he looked exhausted. 

Hermione searched for something to say, but finding nothing that was both reassuring and true, clicked her mouth shut. 

“You were working under terrible conditions, sir,” she settled for after an awkward pause. It seemed needlessly cruel to try and reassure him that his legal reforms, incremental and subtle as they had been, had made any meaningful change after a genocidal war had just taken place. The law had not protected the Muggle born from their fates under Voldemort’s puppet government. 

Tiberius was looking at the house elves, the blur of activity as they prepared a feast for the evening meal. Pots and pans clattered in the bright busy kitchen, the fires roared. The high voices of the Elves interspersed with cheery laughter as they scrambled about in a bustle of preparation.

“So I was,” Tiberius agreed slowly. “So I was.”

He turned towards Hermione, seeming to leave introspection and sorrow behind, and his face now seemed thoughtful rather than morose. 

“But conditions have suddenly changed,” he said, leaning towards her with a shrewd evaluation in his eye. “Wouldn’t you agree, Ms. Granger?”

Hermione considered the battle, the rumours of Death Eaters meeting in the North, the classmates who had first called her the names that were ultimately carved with a curse blade into her arm.

“Wizarding Britain might yet collapse into internal war,” she said. It was the first time she had admitted that glum truth to herself. 

“It may,” Ogden answered her, “If we are not careful. But here, finally, there is a gap long enough in the power to push through true reform, not the mere trifles I was able to achieve in my lifetime.”

He leaned in towards Hermione, and she found herself drawn to his serious gaze. His blue eyes were a startling contrast to the wrinkled tan of his almond skin.

“I am gathering a group of reformers who want to see us rise up, like a phoenix out of these ashes. I have contacts in the South African wizarding government and the Indian governments who are willing to help us with funding and the making of our democracy. But I need more people to help us. I can tell you have a brilliant legal mind, and that you aren’t afraid to argue for that which may be unpopular. Would you join me, Ms. Granger, in this endeavour?”

Hermione clapped a hand against her mouth. 

“Oh!” she exclaimed, flabbergasted that he had so quickly taken her into his confidence. 

Perhaps beyond her supposed legal acumen (which she couldn’t help but doubt, not even having her N.E.W.T.s) Ogden would benefit from her notoriety, her obvious ties to the Muggle world, her association with being one of the hands that had brought Voldemort down.

“What can you offer me?” she asked shrewdly, amazed at her daring. 

But Tiberius sat back in his stool with a smile, as if she was asking exactly the right question. 

“Not money, I’m afraid,” he said simply. “We’re on a shoestring budget as it is. But I’ll take you on as my apprentice, if you want it. All lawyers in Britain are trained by apprenticeship.”

Hermione took a deep breath. 

Her future, to this point, had been uncertain. 

But hearing Tiberius talk about democracy was sparking a fire within her, one she thought had been smothered by the ashes of the war, officially over but really still being quashed in gaps and stutters as guerilla groups initiated attacks and retreats on remote villages. 

She looked at the bustle of the House Elves around her, at the sound of their voices, took in the smells of the cooking and the heat of the fires. 

She straightened her shoulders, set her butterbeer down. Met Tiberius’s eyes. 

“I’ll do it,” she agreed, extending his hands to him. 

And a smile cracked new wrinkles on Tiberius’s face.

“You won’t regret it, my dear,” he said, shaking her hand with vigour, “you won’t.”


	30. Inheritance

*** AUTHORS NOTE****

For those who have been reading BEFORE April 8, 2020: I have changed the order of several chapters lately. Chapter 23 and 24 are NEW MATERIAL, so please go back and read that! I really hope this isn't too confusing. My apologies!!!


	31. Strength

*** AUTHORS NOTE***

For any readers who have read this BEFORE April 8, 2020, please go back and re-read Chapter 23 and 24, THEY ARE NEW MATERIAL. I have re-ordered the chapters. My apologies for any confusion.


End file.
